3 ms·

If there was any real desire to understand causes, comprehensive yearly body burden screening for industrial, agricultural, and food additives as a standard med

If there was any real desire to understand causes, comprehensive yearly body burden screening for industrial, agricultural, and food additives as a standard medical practice. Then look to see if there's any strong correlations with cancer in young people. See this from 2001: https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden.html https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden.html > "...samples of Bill Moyers' blood and urine were analyzed. Eighty-four distinct chemicals were found. His test results – much like a chemical fingerprint – revealed evidence of hazardous chemicals in common use – as well as compounds banned for more than a quarter century – and others so obscure that almost no public information is available to identify what products might have resulted in Moyers' exposure." As far as why such an obvious program isn't being carried out, it's because politicians wouldn't fund it due to lobbying pressure by the guilty parties. I don't think even the East Palestine victims of the train bomb that was set off there are getting regular body burden screens right now, for example.

robocat 3y ago
> As far as why such an obvious program isn't being carried out, it's because politicians Occam's razor: perhaps simply because the idea can't work. "Eighty-four distinct chemicals" - so what? There is already an uncountable number of man-made chemicals yet we are not all dieing of cancer at grossly accelerated rates beyond what's natural. Weak signals are hard to find in noisy data. BBQed food is carcinogenic - does that mean we should ban the uncountable number of chemicals caused by a BBQ?
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  Well, maybe 95% of those 84 persistent chemicals are harmless - but if gastrointestinal cancer cases in young people consistently correlated with the other 5%, then you know where the problem lies. It's a pretty straightforward approach, and while testing labs cost money, at scale it would be a relatively minor cost.

robocat 3y ago

> As far as why such an obvious program isn't being carried out, it's because politicians Occam's razor: perhaps simply because the idea can't work. "Eighty-four distinct chemicals" - so what? There is already an uncountable number of man-made chemicals yet we are not all dieing of cancer at grossly accelerated rates beyond what's natural. Weak signals are hard to find in noisy data. BBQed food is carcinogenic - does that mean we should ban the uncountable number of chemicals caused by a BBQ?

photochemsyn 3y ago
Well, maybe 95% of those 84 persistent chemicals are harmless - but if gastrointestinal cancer cases in young people consistently correlated with the other 5%, then you know where the problem lies. It's a pretty straightforward approach, and while testing labs cost money, at scale it would be a relatively minor cost.