Friday, November 04, 2005

New Idea of "Level" Playing Field

"If you believe California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, food-based acrylamide causes 180 cancers each year in residents of the Golden State. That's why Lockyer has gone to court to force food vendors and manufacturers to slap cancer warning labels on all of the state's chips and fries, in order, he claims, to provide consumers with 'the information we need to make informed decisions…' But Lockyer's move has four small but significant problems.

"The first of these is that the science is somewhat uncooperative. Whatever CSPI and Lockyer might say about rats and WHO, and whatever junk science trick they pull, they simply can't get around the very clear epidemiological evidence that acrylamide is not associated with an increased risk of cancer in human populations. As leading acrylamide researcher Lorelei Mucci of Harvard said some two years ago, "It's very reassuring to know that when we looked in detail at the effects of consuming foods containing high levels of acrylamide we found no increased risk for three major cancers."


John Luik, "The Warning Label We Need," 10/6/2005
TechCentralStation.com


In case you didn't know about this, free market and liberty Web side Tech Central Station has been following the California torts game, among many other subjects, including scientific assessments of global warming (as opposed to rhetorical re-assessments of real science). Under the guidance of California Attorney General Lockyer, not a friend of the Governor's, one may intuit, the state that doesn't seem to want your business has a new sport for the specialist in torts, Proposition 65. It's always good to see what games legal entrepreneurs are up to in the name of a level playing field.

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