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  1. You write “New damning evidence is proving that DDT is more noxious than ever, causing a four-fold increase in breast cancer risk. But that’s not all . . .”

    The blue segment is a click through to a paper which has no reference that I can find to any “four fold increase,” nor indeed to any increase, in cancer risk.

    What the paper says is that in utero exposure to DDT is linked to later cancers, now as always. Nothing new here, and in particular no increase of anything.

    One danger of misreporting like this is that the author may be reporting an increase in cancer incidence associated with DDT. The problem here is that since the baseline rate is associated with no DDT, the journalist has undermined the credibility of DDT as a danger, since she is only showing that it increases an already present danger, rather than causing that danger.

    This apparently exculpatory line of reasoning is not claimed by the chemical folks: it results only from logical thought based on reporting which is not just opinionated, which is OK, but also erroneous, which is emphatically not.

    -dlj.

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