Project Censored’s Lunacy: The 2001 Version
Project Censored’s latest list of the most underreported stories is out and once again they highlight the enormous problem with some left wing criticism of the media. It is not that they don’t find an occasional story that really did deserve more coverage, but rather that for a significant number of the stories there are very good reasons why the mainstream media didn’t devote more coverage to them.
Does DDT Cause Cancer?
The first exhibit is story number 23, Very Small Levels of Chemical Exposures Can be Dangerous. This claim appears to be based entirely on a story written by Frances Cerra Whittelsey for In These Times. But just reading the article, What’s In Your Green Tea? illustrates a major problem with her claims — namely there’s almost no evidence in their for the claim that “very small levels of chemical exposures can be dangerous.”
What Whittelsey does demonstrate is something that has been widely reported elsewhere — trace amounts of manmade chemicals are present throughout the world including in food and our bodies. If you paid for a sensitive enough blood test, for example, you would almost certainly discover very low levels of DDT within your body. That is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether or not this is in any way dangerous. In fact numerous studies over the last 20 years have been conducted exploring the effects of low levels of DDT on everything from breast cancer to birth defects and so far there is no evidence that links the chemical to health problems. Whittelsey herself is forced to concede this with a well-parsed paragraph,
Among many breast cancer activists and some scientists, there is a strong belief that past and present small-scale exposure to DDT is the cause of at least some breast, prostate and other kinds of cancer. But not all the evidence is clear. A 1993 study showed that women with malignant breast cancer had higher blood levels of DDT than women without the disease, but it has been difficult to really nail down cause and effect. A May 1994 toxicological profile of the chemical prepared for the U.S. Public Health Service noted that studies of workers exposed to DDT in the workplace “do not indicate conclusively an association” between DDT exposure and cancer.
This is especially problematic for people who believe that manmade chemicals such as DDT are behind the surge in cancer rates over the last 50 years (which is actually mostly a surge in cancer detection rates). If in fact manmade chemicals are responsible for very large increases in cancer rates it is extremely odd that correlations between DDT levels in the body and cancer rates. Compare that to something like smoking and lung cancer where lung cancer rates shot up dramatically and scientists found enormous increases in risk of contracting lung cancer among smokers (as high as an 8-fold increased risk).
The media doesn’t widely report the claim that low level exposure to DDT is dangerous largely because there is a paucity of evidence for that claim.
Starving Rats to Death with Genetically Modified Food
Number 7, Independent Study Points to Dangers of Genetically Altered Foods (Dismissed by Media and Biotech Industry), is even worse and exposes the intellectual dishonesty that pervades the Project Censored awards. According to Project Censored,
Arpad PusztaiÂ’s study found that rats fed transgenic potatoes (artificially bioengineered to include a gene from another species) showed evidence of organ damage, thickening of the small intestine, and poor brain development. The transgenic potatoes used in the study had been genetically engineered to contain lectin, a sugar binding protein, to make the plants pest-resistant. The adverse reactions only occurred in the group that was fed the transgenic potatoes. The control group, fed plain potatoes mixed with lectin from the same source, were normal.
For a group that claims to be trying to air the truth that the media wants to cover up, it is worth noting that Project Censored completely ignores the real scientific controversy that surrounded Pusztai’s study. To put it bluntly, their study was so poorly conducted that not only did the media and the biotech industry attack it, but so did the UK Royal Society and other scientific groups. But judge for yourself.
In a scientific experiment, typically researchers are expected to have both an experimental group and a control. In this case, Pusztai used rats. He fed his control group non-modified potatoes while feeding the experimental group the genetically modified potatoes. But that wasn’t the only dietary change. Specifically, the control rats at a normal diet typical of rats, but the experimental group was fed a diet that consisted of only six percent protein.
As Harry Kuiper pointed out in The Lancet, “There is convincing evidence that short-term protein stress and starvation impair the growth rate, development, hepatic metabolism and immune function of rats.” Essentially if you starve a rate of protein, like Pusztai did to his experimental animals, you shouldn’t be surprised if they exhibit “evidence of organ damage, thickening of the small intestine, and poor brain development” regardless of whether or not they’re eating a genetically modified potato.
Beyond the issue of whether or not Pusztai’s study was valid or not, it is bizarre that Project Censored chose to reduce the scientific debate about the study to simply, “Dismissed by Media and Biotech Industry.”
I could go on and one about other stories (though some of them do have more substances, such as the ongoing U.S. plan to spray herbicides over Colombia to destroy coca plants), but I’ll stop here. It still amazes me, though, that so many people take Project Censored seriously since it seems to highlight the worst aspect of Leftist media criticism rather than its best aspects.
Sources:
Scientists at odds over GM food study. Tim Radford, Guardian Unlimited, October 15, 1999.
Project Censored 2001: The Top 25 Media Censored Stories of 2000. Project Censored, 2001.
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