Children are NOT more sensitive /vulnerable to chemicals in the environment

Steve Milloy @ Junkscience.com

Let’s review the nonsense in today’s New York Times op-ed by notorious junk scientist goofballs Phil Landrigan (Mt. Sinai) and Lynn Goldman (George Washington University).

Mt. Sinai’s Phil Landrigan, a health scare dinosaur who admitted

long ago that legally applied pesticides hurt no one.

GWU’s Lynn Goldman, who leaped to embrace the infamous 1996 Tulane University

endocrine disrupter study that was eventually retracted as science fraud.

The NYTimes op-ed is here.
Let’s take the most egregious BS, paragraph by paragraph:
1. Kids more sensitive to chemicals?
Landrigan/Goldman write:


First, let’s address the stolen valor. The ‘National Academy of Sciences’ and its prestigious members made no such report. The report was issued by a panel of second- and third-rate scientists put together by the NAS’ for-hire consulting arm called the National Research Council.
Second, yes, children are not little adults — but they are not more or “uniquely sensitive” to chemical exposures. For a dose of reality, check out this observation from the American Cancer Society:

So children can take higher doses of highly toxic chemotherapy drugs precisely because they are more resilient than adults.
Third, when the so-called “National Academy of Sciences” report was issued in 1993, panel chairman Landrigan told the media that there was no evidence that legally applied pesticides had ever hurt anyone. I believe his exact quote may be found in what was at the time called the “BNA Daily Environment Report.”
2. Low-level exposures are harmful?
Landrigan/Goldman write:

As to “air pollution,” U.S. air is clean and safe. No one is harmed in any way by it. As reported by JunkScience, EPA experimented on children by spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of children as young as 10 years with no reported harm. If anyone thought air pollution was really harmful, such experimentation would be patently illegal.
As to lead, except for children who eat lead paint chips or swallow lead trinkets or have some otehr acute exposure to lead, no child is harmed by low levels of lead in the environment, water or their blood.
While today, people pee in their pants over any lead detected in children’s blood, the reality is that children have historically relatively high blood lead levels with no apparent adverse effect. Consider the following chart from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

Be assured that typical child blood lead levels were higher before the 1970s due to waste incineration and leaded gasoline. No harm was observed or reported.
3. Lions and tigers and chemcials, oh my!
Landrigan/Goldman
writerave:

Some reality:

• Herb Needleman’s work on lead causing problems in kids was determined to be ‘difficult to explain as honest error.’
• The Seychelles data debunks the notion that mercury from fish is harming children.
• PCBs are not used anymore. They were phased out starting in 1976. If exposure to PCBs was so harmful, where was all the damage prior to the 1970s? Here‘s a good debunking of PCB hysteria.
• See e.g., there is no evidence that phthalates hurt children either.
• The flame retardant “researchers” didn’t even bother to study the children themselves.
• The chlorpyrifos claim is also bogus as it is based on secret science. The Columbia University researchers making the claim will not release their data for independent review and replication.

SUMMARY: There is not a scintilla of credible evidence that children have been harmed by chemicals in the environment or that they are more vulnerable to such harm.