|
Twice in 1997, Steven Safe published opinion pieces arguing that health risks of endocrine disruptors are unlikely to be significant. The first of these was in the Wall Street Journal (20 August 1997), the second in the New England Journal of Medicine (30 0ctober 1997). Both pieces suffer from fundamental flaws, notably illogical arguments and a highly selective view of the evidence. Safe in the Wall Street Journal: The WSJ op-ed examines a series of separate lines of inquiry into endocrine disruption, concludes that the evidence for each of them is weak or contradictory at best, therefore concern about endocrine disruption in general is unwarranted. This argument is flawed for two reasons. First, the theory of endocrine disruption has many more bases than those Safe dismisses. Even if he were correct about these, significant health concerns would remain. Second, his dismissal of the individual issues he discusses is premature at best and reflects a highly biased view of existing science. More... Safe in the New England Journal of Medicine: The New England Journal commentary by Safe sparked an embarrassing public controversy because the Journal failed to disclose that Safe had been the recipient of significant industry funding, raising questions about his objectivity. This was covered prominently by the Boston Globe. [This never became an issue with the Wall Street Journal because one begins with the assumption that people writing on the editorial page arrive with entrenched biases.] That controversy aside, the main argument advanced in Safe's New England Journal op-ed is that weakly estrogenic contaminants do not cause breast cancer. As clincher, he cites a paper occurring in the same issue of NEJM as refuting that hypothesis. Yet in fact Safe misrepresents the implications of this new work. The result is that he concludes something which cannot be concluded on the basis of the evidence he presents. Not only is it illogical, but it has been disproven subsequently by new data. More...
|
||