Synthetic chemicals in our lives

Can I have the Cliff Notes?

Ok, so what no -synthetic chemical air freshener?

Burned toast

Burned toast

You’re having a stroke.
Is your smile lopsided?
Get to the quacks, right now.

here is some stuff to make you think….

We discover more diseases and can detect then – or are these things we always had but never looked for.
Cause of death – what if died of old age really meant died of something we now have a name for.
What if back 100 years ago people lived as long as we do now – what sort of things would we find?

Watched an interesting documentary on Netflix a couple of nights ago about the rise in exposure to chemicals and what it might be doing to us.

Take a look at old inner city sandstone buildings in industrial towns, black from all the soot, smoke and pollution that was wafting round. The science of things like steel making hasn’t really changed but out control of the pollution has. Heavy industry used to spew out tonnes and tonnes of some fairly nasty stuff but we got on top of that. The word chemicals is a strange one, it doesn’t really mean what you think it does.

In 1995, the incidence of autism was 1 in 400 children. Nowadays it’s 1 in 88

To finish on this – my mother was a teacher for nearly 40 years, she stopped about 5 years ago. As she put it (with a lot of experience along the way) the kids we diagnose today with Autism etc. would just have been lumped in with the naughty/shitty kids back then.
Until I met some Aussies I never really knew what vegimite was but now I know I can find it everywhere I look, if you don’t look for it you won’t find it.

OK so there may be Glyphosate residuals in your food, we do actually have qualified people looking at stuff like this who make up reasoned rules on what is acceptable and what is not after properly assess the risks

Thank goodness for that. All of them do it completely remotely from any self-interest in outcomes too I imagine… 😉

All of them do it completely remotely from any self-interest in outcomes too I imagine

ah the usual conspiracy criticism…
want to peer review some science?

I know what you’re saying and it always sounds a touch paranoid, but I’m fairly sure that biased outcomes happen in all sorts of testing. I think it’s a good thing to be slightly paranoid of scientific studies, though I prefer to call it questioning. 🙂

Good science calls out bias, good reviewing finds bias.
Generally the people who present the most bias are the like of the
Andrew Wakefileds[/url]
and the press

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues[1] published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioral regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.[2]

Almost immediately afterward, epidemiological studies were conducted and published, refuting the posited link between MMR vaccination and autism.[3,4] The logic that the MMR vaccine may trigger autism was also questioned because a temporal link between the two is almost predestined: both events, by design (MMR vaccine) or definition (autism), occur in early childhood.

The reporting of lots of stuff
The Famous Daily Mail’s Kill/Cure/Both List[/url]
means that sometimes the science gets lost in the search for a headline.

The process of review & peer review is the best mechanism to deal with bad science.

whereas anyone with an idea, no matter how half baked or idiotic, access to a computer, and a few ‘followers’ can write a blog about this sort of stuff and destroy reputations with no comeback. Because it’s ‘opinion’

I work in the chemical industry, with ‘chemicals’ that are around us all every day and the steps we take and continue to take to make safe stuff even safer just because someone *thinks* it might be linked to some sort of condition is bewildering.

Yes, there is ‘self-interest’ but there’s no worse self-interest than someone who’s on a non-reviewed crusade. And any attempt to review or criticise it is always met with – ‘well you would say that wouldn’t you’

Can’t win. We should let the internet experts decide it for us. Cancer will die out because no-one will live long enough to get it any more, once these bastard scientists stop peddling their dangerous chemicals to us.

We’ve been exposed to non-background levels of ‘chemicals’ since the start of the industrial revolution

Way before that. Wood smoke is really bad for you, and our ancestors spent their lives sitting in caves or huts with fires on and *no chimneys*. There’s evidence of their lungs being full of shitty chemicals from pure natural organic fuels.

I think it’s a good thing to be slightly paranoid of scientific studies

Moderate scepticism – good
Cycnicism – less good
Paranoia – bad

Ok, so what no -synthetic chemical air freshener?

Windows, time or mtfu.

Pot pourri.

Love people who deride you for eating say Frosties saying things like “I am so anti chemicals, you don’t know what you’re putting in your body”.

They then will go and buy a random white powder from a random unlicensed bloke/woman and unknown source. Then proceed to smash it up their nose, bomb it or whatever.

People are odd.

I’m having an issue with markers pens just now, and whether kids should be using them or not in school. A soapbox parent is on to prove they are all bad, lots of pseudo science info being sent to me, but I have to admit that some of it is actually not bad.

It does raise the question of whether little people, close to the floor, should be using marker pens in groups, where the heavier solvents fall to. Nowt fancy, bit of isopropol, ethanol or similar.

God forbid the kids should go near ethanol eh? 🙂

I remember sniffing 1,1,1 Trichloroethane* at the back of class at school, happy (but possibly dangerous) days.

* Little bottles of Tipp-ex thinners, the ones with the green lids.

I’m having an issue with markers pens just now, and whether kids should be using them or not in school. A soapbox parent is on to prove they are all bad, lots of pseudo science info being sent to me, but I have to admit that some of it is actually not bad.

It does raise the question of whether little people, close to the floor, should be using marker pens in groups, where the heavier solvents fall to. Nowt fancy, bit of isopropol, ethanol or similar.
I’m fairly sure that there are no permanent markers on the market with harmful vapour.
And in any case, the amount that could be inhaled from a pen is nothing compared to traffic, bonfires, or a whole bunch of other sources.
Don’t most markers used by children have water-based inks? Sharpies don’t, but they don’t really give off much smell/vapour, either.
And what about the various plastics that children play with; many of those give off tiny amounts of vapour in the form of plasticisers, just look at the grey haze that forms on car windscreens over time.
It’s not just what people eat or drink that shortens human life:
Back in the 17-18th centuries, some people used to break up the Sarcen stones in the valley of Fyfield Down above Avebury, to use as building materials.
They’d spend winters up there, building fires around the stones to heat them up, then throwing freezing water onto them to shatter them.
Life expectancy was 33 years of age, and not because of the smoke, just basic hardship.
Frankly, it’s not some unspecified chemicals that cause issues, it’s the sheer volume of poor quality food many people shovel into their gobs.

Ahhh, the halcyon days of when bubbles was legal, sigh

Geez the lack of scientific understanding in some of you is frightening. OK so there may be Glyphosate residuals in your food, we do actually have qualified people looking at stuff like this who make up reasoned rules on what is acceptable and what is not after properly assess the risks.

Yes and now these people you refer to have realised they were probably wrong. I’m not really sure what your point is though, are you saying people dying from smoking or asbestos are just making a big old fuss because it used to be considered OK by qualified people?