Pesticides

Pick just about any newspaper or journal and during the course of a year, one or more articles will be devoted to the benefits (or not) of organic foods and the downsides (or not) of conventionally grown food with pesticides and herbicides.

Scaring old people is a time-tested strategy to scrounge up votes ("He'll take away your Medicare!") or to steal money ("Your Social Security number has been compromised. Please send payment.")

By Michael Dourson, Bernard K. Gadagbui, and Patrician M. McGinnis

How do you know when a "study" isn't really a study? When the people who performed it wrote up a brochure hyping its results before actually bothering to publish a scientific paper.

We had a really bad flu season this year. The CDC just announced that about 80,000 Americans were killed.

Some studies are so incredibly stupid, that one wonders how they managed to get published in any scientific journal, let alone a prestigious one. And yet, it has happened, once again1.

Like the word "chemical," the word "pesticide" has been hijacked and then unfairly demonized.

Two weeks ago, we reported on a bizarre decision by the online news arm of the journal Science: The outlet had reprinted an article

One of the problems with science communication is that we are always a day or two behind the mass media. The general pattern is this:

The Environmental Working Group has once again released their Dirty Dozen list — the fruits and veggies they say are covered in pesticides. One minor detail: organic produce contains pesticides, too, but that doesn't quite fit their narrative.