Which is why I said that I don’t think the law is particularly effective. There is going to be a small contingent of people who will knee-jerk refuse to buy anything with the label, and a large majority of people who will basically ignore it, because they see it everywhere. And maybe three people who understand what the label means and act accordingly…

I don’t think the mix of science and business is the real problem. I think the real problem is that people want everything to be black-and-white, yes/no, and reality is never like that. I just read a relevant comment (on a completely different subject) at another web site: “One big part of being educated is learning to say ‘I don’t know.’”

People don’t want to hear, “I don’t know.” If the weather forecast calls for a 20% chance of rain, and it rains, a lot of people are going to say that the forecast was wrong…

As you should know, in the scientific world, virtually nothing is simple. But in the pragmatic, day-to-day world, simple virtually always trumps sensible. Sometimes that’s for the better, but more often it just drives sensible people crazy…

-Steve

I was originally trained as a biologist and I can tell you that “real evidence” for carcinogen effect can be utterly notional. There are many types of carcinogenic assay methods and they have wildly different cost and accuracies. Historical epidemiology e.g. finding people who were exposed to known amounts and seeing how many got cancer, is the best, most expensive, hardest to do and the least seldom done. The worst, least expensive, easiest and most often done is to expose human cells to unrealistically high levels of a substance and count how many mutate. It is the latter test that is the basis for most cancer warnings.

It’s a valid, scientific assay method that meets the letter of the law. It also tells you absolutely nothing about the risk in real world exposures.

Trouble is, we know for certain that all the non-epidemiological carcinogen assays are overly sensitive because while our exposure to notional carcinogens over the last 50-100 years has increased literally by a factor of hundreds of thousands, cancer rates corrected for an aging population and known causes such as smoking, sunbathing, radon etc, have barely budged overtly and have probably decreased significantly. If the cancer assays actually reflected the real world risk, then cancer rates, especially in the non-elderly would be something like 30 times higher than they are.

The FDA says that only 2% of all cancers are caused by exposure to natural and artificial chemicals. Most of those are industrial exposures. That really doesn’t warrant slapping a label virtually everything especially when it makes the real needed warnings e.g. on a bottle of Toluene, invisible.

Scaring people about cancer is big business (literally) and big politics as well. When money and politics get hold of science, nothing good happens.

And it’s not true that a label is required in all cases. About half of the chemicals on the list include a “no significant risk” or “maximum allowable dose” exposure level. If the exposure is below that level, the label is not required (see http://oehha.ca.gov/prop65/getNSRLs.html).

-Steve

HERE’S THE SCOOP: It’s OSHA that is going to step in and make this mandatory!! Just like when they were trying to make everything non-smoking and bill after bill was shot down, OSHA simply stepped in and said smoke was dangerous to the employees and that was that. No need for a Senate vote…just the strong arm of OSHA.

I will keep looking for Butler, though, as his technology was closest to being commercial, and close to licensing.

Al