Most Americans don't have any idea how well the Department of Agriculture protects the grower at the expense of the consumer. When a chemical is banned from use, a farmer or livestock operator who has the chemical in stock has a choice: either to lose money by disposing of the product, or to use it and take the risk of getting caught breaking the law. How severe is that risk? Well, if you use a banned product in your cattle feed, you have to face the prospect that the government is going to inspect one out of every 250,000 carcasses. They will test this carcass not for all banned substances, but just for a small fraction of them. And even if they detect some residue of a banned substance, and even if they're able to trace the carcass to the ranch that produced it, the guilty rancher is likely at most to receive a stern letter with a strongly worded warning. I never met a rancher who suffered in any way from breaking any regulation meant to protect the safety of our meat. The whole procedure is, in short, a charade.
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Since its inception 25 years ago, EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] has applied the same logic to hundreds of other substances, extrapolating from high levels in animal studies to arrive at acceptable levels for humans. But that approach, say scientists both inside and outside the federal government, may no longer be the best way to safeguard public health...EPA's new emphasis on molecular data is based on a growing body of evidence that extrapolations from megadoses can provide a misleading picture of the effects of low-level exposure. Chloroform is a good example. EPA's current strict standards were derived from a study in which mice developed liver tumors after exposure to massive daily doses of chloroform pumped into their stomachs over several months. However, those findings may not be relevant to human exposures, according to a paper picked by the Society of Toxicology as the best published last year in its journal.
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CONCLUSION ON DRUG TESTING The inescapable conclusion is that drug companies choose animal tests over scientific methods because of the utter unreliability of animal tests. Because each animal species is unique in its physiological, biochemical, histological, morphological and other characteristics, and consequently reacts differently to substances, drug companies can produce results favourable to their interests by simply choosing the appropriate species.
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The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.
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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
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The principal method of determining potential carcinogenicity of substances is based on studies of daily administration of huge doses of chemicals to inbred rodents for a lifetime. Then by questionable models, which include large safety factors, the results are extrapolated to effects of minuscule doses in humans... The rodent MTD test that labels plant chemicals as cancer-causing in humans is misleading. The test is likewise of limited value for synthetic chemicals. The standard carcinogen tests that use rodents are an obsolescent relic of the ignorance of past decades.
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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
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Carolyn Burnham: I see you're smoking pot now. I suppose you think smoking illegal psychotropic substances is a good example to set for our sixteen year-old daughter?! Lester Burnham: You're one to talk, you bloodless, money-grubbing freak.
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Given a number of new substances being considered for addition to these agreements, it is critical for the United States to have a real and equal voice at the table.
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It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or two things still safe to eat.
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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
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In spite of all evidence to the contrary, the entire universe is composed of only two basic substances: Magic and bullshit.
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