By Terence Corcoran, Financial Post
The National
Post, January 15, 2004 We have a rich history of health scares,
great trumped-up phony hazards that supposedly lurk in our food and environment.
Cancer-causing agents, identified by the thousands, march through the media
almost daily. The big ones—from electromagnetic fields to alar to PCBs and trans
fats—linger for years in the public mind before they eventually fade. Sometimes
whole industries are wiped out or are traumatized.
Over the last seven
days we've had stories about cancer-causing salmon and deaths caused by obesity
and tobacco. The Globe and Mail, official publisher of the toxic
terrorism industry, sometimes runs two a day. "Obesity now kills one in 10,
research suggests," it reported Monday. A few pages later in the same edition,
another story said tobacco use "accounts for one in almost every four deaths."
The two stories together create the absurd impression that 35% of all deaths in
Canada could be avoided if only tobacco and obesity could be
eliminated.
This is, at best, scientific fraud. People should stop
smoking, but to suggest tobacco is the sole cause of the deaths of 48,000
Canadians every year, including 100 babies under the age of one, is a gross
misrepresentation of cause and effect. The same is true with obesity.
But
at least there are statistical links between tobacco, obesity and bad health.
The same cannot be said for farm salmon, the latest victim of scientific
harassment. The Globe and Mail, after having run a front-page story last
week headlined "Farm salmon are laced with toxins," yesterday added to the
alarm. In a commentary, one Andrew Weil, a clinical professor of medicine from
Arizona, concluded that is was time to "stop eating farm salmon until salmon
farmers clean up their act." How could the farmers do that? They should be
"forced to prove" that farm salmon is safe.
That must be a little inside
joke, because Mr. Weil would know that he and the band of anti-salmon farm
activists in the health and science communities have set ridiculous standards to
prove that farm salmon is safe. The study that set off the latest salmon scare,
in Science magazine last week, found traces of PCBs and other chemicals
in farm salmon that are well below government standards. But still the authors
of the study claimed the wild salmon posed a cancer risk.
PCB-cancer
scares have been around for decades, despite the fact that all credible
scientific studies and agencies have failed to find a connection. In his book,
The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg reported on scores of
studies, including work by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, that found "the
data do not support" any links between PCBs and cancer. Elizabeth Whelan, head
of the American Council on Science and Health, says there is "absolutely no
credible evidence that environmental exposure to PCBs poses a risk of human
cancer (or any other illness)." See her comment nearby.
So who's pushing
the farm salmon scare if there's no science behind it? One of the researchers in
the Science magazine paper was David O. Carpenter, director of the
Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York in
Albany. Mr. Carpenter is a veteran in the health scare business, having spent a
fair amount of time promoting the idea that the electromagnetic fields around
power lines caused cancer. That theory crashed some years ago, and Mr. Carpenter
moved on to PCBs.
And just in case the PCB-cancer link falls apart, he's
also claiming that the chemicals in farm salmon operate as endocrine disrupters
and lead to mental and physical defects in babies whose mothers consume
PCB-laced food products. Appearing on CBC Radio's science show last Saturday,
Mr. Carpenter claimed that such babies can suffer from 5% to 7% lower IQ ratings
because of PCBs.
The science for this is also generally acknowledged to
be a crock. There's no proof that it happens, just as there was no proof that
PCBs caused falling sperm counts as once claimed by Mr. Carpenters' colleagues
in the health-scare business.
Mr. Carpenter seems uncommonly dedicated to
undermining salmon farming. On CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, he drifted over to
another subject to discredit the industry. "It's very telling," he said, "that
the farm salmon are pink or red only because of an added dye. If they don't add
the dye, the colour of the fish is a dirty gray."
"Oh no!" said the CBC's
shocked science whiz, Bob McDonald, displaying a classic media response. While
it is true that farm salmon are fed a natural colour as part of their feed to
give them a salmon colour, it is not a "dye" any more than the food that gives
wild salmon (shrimps, for example) their colour. But Mr. Carpenter, a seasoned
pro at public health scares and gullible journalists, had scored another point. © National Post 2004 http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/
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