As usual in this kind of thing, "linked to" in this context does not mean anything like "actually known to cause breast cancer in humans." Just as we have cured cancer in rodents repeatedly, we have also caused cancer in rodents repeatedly, sometimes by giving them extremely high doses of chemicals that do not correspond to how much a human might consume.
The actual paper [1] is quite bad. They mine the literature for chemicals with any publication that suggests a link to cancer (or appearance in certain databases based on the same approach), and then spend most of their efforts determining amounts of production and use of the chemicals in question.
This is almost pure propaganda. No actual science has been performed, and the quality of the result is directly dependent on the underlying quality of thousands of individual studies that haven’t been reviewed.
(To be completely fair to the authors, the Guardian article is completely misleading. Their goal was not to identitfy carcinogens, but rather, to engage in “risk reduction analysis” for the universe of chemicals that might plausibly be considered a carcinogen if you didn’t have any other evidence and cast a ridiculously wide net. Still a dumb goal, IMO, but not as dumb as the article makes it sound.)
I really hope that Canada joining the EU forces some stricter regulations on crops grown in Canada. It’s sad how poor of a job our government does to protect its citizens.
But also, another way to frame this is "Linked to" is a keyword indicating we dont know enough positive or negatively for human impact, and therefore its a long term experiment.
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.)
This problem with things like this is that the real science is extremely costly to do and the usage of chemicals across the entirety of our environment is exploding borderline exponentially with time and obviously these things we didn't evolve to tolerate and low and behold so many new health issues are just skyrocketing in incidence.
That's the other extreme, not "the alternative." Science is knowing fewer things, but knowing them well (to a high degree of certainty). Making stuff up is "knowing" more things but being uncertain and/or wrong. In between the two, there's a whole spectrum. I'm willing to "know" a few more things, but know them less well. Like being pretty sure pesticide exposure is not decreasing my risk of cancer for example.
The other thing is, I would be willing to be presumptively wrong about something like this, for the sake of safety. If someone wants to add a chemical to "the environment" (a commons) then I think the burden of proving it's safe falls on them.
This is almost pure propaganda. No actual science has been performed, and the quality of the result is directly dependent on the underlying quality of thousands of individual studies that haven’t been reviewed.
(To be completely fair to the authors, the Guardian article is completely misleading. Their goal was not to identitfy carcinogens, but rather, to engage in “risk reduction analysis” for the universe of chemicals that might plausibly be considered a carcinogen if you didn’t have any other evidence and cast a ridiculously wide net. Still a dumb goal, IMO, but not as dumb as the article makes it sound.)
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/evhpaz/article/doi/10.1021/EHP.6c00022/...
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.)
So what do?
Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk
The alternative is just making things up because it makes you feel better, so I’ll take actual science.
The other thing is, I would be willing to be presumptively wrong about something like this, for the sake of safety. If someone wants to add a chemical to "the environment" (a commons) then I think the burden of proving it's safe falls on them.