First a confession. Whenever Nicholas Kristof writes a piece about the evil, awful world of chemicals out there, I feel a twitchy need to kick something. Or someone. Possibly right there in The New York Times newsroom.
So when I saw the headline of today's piece, which was titled "Big Chem, Big Harm" I looked around for a handy target. Unfortunately, my husband had left the living room. So he was both out of range and unavailable when I wanted to know how any responsible journalist could write a scare-mongering sentence like "New research is demonstrating that some common chemicals all around us all around us are even worse than previously thought". And then fail to name any of said chemicals at all except for that poster-child of the endocrine disruptor crusade,BPA. And base the entire column on exactly one study looking at low-dose response to BPA in mice.
I actually find low=dose response toxicology really fascinating. And I don't disagree that we should thoroughly research commonly used compounds like BPA, found in everything from cash register receipts to metal can linings. But I do think it's absolutely wrong to write without any real context, wrongly making it sound as if this is the most dangerous material out there. Just as one example, the poison arsenic, which is also found in our food supply, appears to be a much more potent endocrine disruptor.
There's an outstanding rebuttal to Kristof's column today by Trevor Butterworth at Forbes, titled "Why Nicholas Kristof's Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Us All." It cites a piece I wrote last spring, when I was blogging at the Public Library of Science, in which I made some of these points in much more depth. I called it Nicholas Kristof and the Bad, Bad Chemical World and it sorted through a series of his chemical columns, all of them - trust me - annoying to anyone who actually cares about this subject and getting it right.
Here's part of what I wrote then: "When we have influential journalists using the world chemical as a synonym for spawn-of-Satan then we have journalists who've missed their opportunity to inform the public as to what is a legitimate risk and what is not." And I haven't changed my mind on that point, not at all.
