Beginning in 1976 with a book entitled Panic In The Pantry, the team of scholars that went on to found the American Council on Science and Health and to form its first trustees and Scientific Advisory Panel, have been clarifying, as the Wall Street Journal called our mission, the difference between a health threat and a health scare. By the mid-1970s, promoting fear and doubt about food and chemicals and the environment was already big business. And the techniques have only gotten more outrageous. Writing in Canada Free Press, Jack Dini, author of Challenging Environmental Mythology, recently noted that the levels of a chemical needed to get an effect in animal models, most often rodents, can be rather extreme — no person is going to drink 800 cans of soda in a day, or consume 7,000 packets of aspartame, or slam down 10,000 shots of scotch. But in rats, that is entirely possible… Read more.
