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Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

95 points · 29 comments · Teever

  1. mattmaroon · · focus · HN ↗
    “Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.
    1. rdiddly · · focus · HN ↗
      "Linked to" by having been studied and shown to increase tumor rates in rodent testing. That not good enough for ya? Too pseudo-sciencey?
      1. timr · · focus · HN ↗
        Yes, that’s not good enough. Rodents are not humans. Then you have to deal with the dose, the setting, the difference in healthy lifespan, and a million other factors that differ from actual people in the real world.

        On top of all of that, this paper did no actual research - it just mined existing literature for any chemicals with at least one paper saying that it did something cancer-related in mice or other assays.

        Based on prior experience, almost certainly a substantial proportion of these papers are crap, but they don’t make any effort to figure that out (because that would be science, and therefore hard.)

        1. abisheakp197 · · focus · HN ↗
          You are right
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