01-02-2005, 02:07 AM
A Look Back at the Great (Unfounded) Health Scares of 2004
By Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan
Perhaps we are a society that relishes bad news. Or maybe by definition bad news is news. Whatever the explanation, 2004 was full of headlines about modern living allegedly making us sick.
The top 10 health scares of the last 12 months -- described below -- have some common characteristics: some of these reports overlook the basic toxicological principle that "the dose makes the poison" and assume that if a lot of something is bad then a little is risky too; some rely on a single, often unpublished study that means little out of the context of other literature in the field; and many swallow whole the baseless mantra "if it causes cancer in a lab animal, it must be assumed to pose a human cancer risk."
The top 10 unfounded scares for 2004 are:
1. Childhood vaccines cause autism. This claim has been around for a while, but it received enormous press exposure this year, with emphasis on the claim that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, is the culprit. Coverage ranged from blatant scaremongering and dismissal of scientific evidence to fairly unbiased assessments of the data. The bottom line: to date, all the evidence supports the view that there is no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, or between any vaccines and autism. This is the conclusion supported by the body of published peer-reviewed scientific studies.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/122904D.html
By Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan
Perhaps we are a society that relishes bad news. Or maybe by definition bad news is news. Whatever the explanation, 2004 was full of headlines about modern living allegedly making us sick.
The top 10 health scares of the last 12 months -- described below -- have some common characteristics: some of these reports overlook the basic toxicological principle that "the dose makes the poison" and assume that if a lot of something is bad then a little is risky too; some rely on a single, often unpublished study that means little out of the context of other literature in the field; and many swallow whole the baseless mantra "if it causes cancer in a lab animal, it must be assumed to pose a human cancer risk."
The top 10 unfounded scares for 2004 are:
1. Childhood vaccines cause autism. This claim has been around for a while, but it received enormous press exposure this year, with emphasis on the claim that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, is the culprit. Coverage ranged from blatant scaremongering and dismissal of scientific evidence to fairly unbiased assessments of the data. The bottom line: to date, all the evidence supports the view that there is no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, or between any vaccines and autism. This is the conclusion supported by the body of published peer-reviewed scientific studies.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/122904D.html