2009-08-19 03:50:27.755934+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments
A number of things about this article on links between pesticides and Parkinson's disease that make me want to dig in to the background a little bit and do some fact checking, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a link there.
[ related topics: Health Food Physiology ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2009-08-19 15:04:07.565138+00 by: ebradway
Just the way they throw around statistics makes me wonder about their conclusion. A positive association without statistical significance simply means there was more noise on the positive side of the curve than the negative. Just leave that crap out of your summary!
Unfortunately, the real problem is stated earlier:
A cause-and-effect relationship between environmental neurotoxins and Parkinson's is difficult to prove.
What seems to be missing from our the food production equation is a cost benefit analysis that factors in all of the "possible connections" as well as the more measurable connections.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-08-19 15:16:28.628339+00 by: Larry Burton [edit history]
I think this statement is telling on a lot of the credibility it takes to believe something:
Christensen, a lifelong environmental activist, suspected an environmental cause -- not only because she was politically inclined to, but because she knew that accumulating scientific information was pointing in that direction.
She wanted the cause to be environmental so the credibility of the evidence didn't have to be quite as high for it to be accepted as it would have been for some other cause. When you think you have found what you are looking for you usually stop looking.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-08-19 15:22:29.035386+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]
Yeah, a bunch of things triggered my warning detectors:
She says it's "anybody's guess" what was in the water, but since many of the industries in St. Louis at the time discharged their wastes into the river, she says the brew probably included organophosphate pesticides, ..."
But I wanted to keep it on my radar, because I've seen a couple of articles on farming techniques that involve beating the living daylights out of strawmen (Blake Hurst's Omnivore's Delusion is one of the worst strawman offenders I've read in a while) and I wanted to keep abreast of the counter-arguments.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-08-20 00:42:08.128476+00 by: Shawn [edit history]
Dan; the Blake article link is missing an 's' in 'delusion'.
#Comment Re: made: 2009-08-20 02:12:05.75773+00 by: Dan Lyke
Thanks. Fixed.