Comments

This is just pathetic. Why should we spend anytime whatsoever trying hunting for possible toxic effects when the benefits are so trivial? The only people interested are those trying to create hysterical fears that they can exploit politically. The supposed harm of all these chemicals is utterly trivial. Yes, it sounds terrible that childhood leukemia cases have supposedly increased 28% since 1974 but in absolute terms, that means next to nothing. Leukemia is very rare so even a significant increase in cases translates into very few additional cases. There are only 3,500 cases of childhood leukemia every year so an increase of 28% comes to only 980 additional cases (not deaths). That is out of a population of 74 million children. That means a child's risk of death has increased from roughly 1 in 29,000 to 1 in 21,000. That's an utterly trivial increase in risk. Even if every additional case was caused by chemical exposure, we would actively kill many times more children by wasting resources trying to save a few hundred lives instead of spending those resources on millions of children. That is not to mention the harm done by people not having access to the benefits that the chemicals bring. It's utterly irresponsible journalism to crank out a hysterical story like this one without putting into perspective the lethal tradeoffs of blanket bans of thousands of chemicals. Just by raising the cost of medication, car seats, sterile surfaces or making fruits and vegetable more expensive, we could easily kill way more children than we save.

Popular Science needs to stop giving credence to the idea that anti-bacterial agents create "super" bacteria. People need to understand how natural selection works. When we do anything, even washing with ordinary soap, that impedes the bacteria's reproduction we create selection pressure that drives the bacteria to evolve around obstacle. However, the selection pressure only creates an evolution change for that obstacle. Nothing else in the bacteria changes except by random chance. For example, using triclosan only creates pressure to evolve a resistance to triclosan. It doesn't otherwise make the bacteria more lethal. Over the last century our practice of washing with ordinary soap has not made bacteria more lethal, it has merely forced them to evolve a better means of surviving in a soapy environment. If triclosan isn't actual effective against bacteria it won't have any evolutionary effect on them at all.

There is a precedent for the hobbit to be both a new species and a victim of a pathology. One of the first Neanderthals skeletons found belonged to an old male later shown to have suffered from severe arthritis. His hunched posture, enlarged joints and knurled hands became the template for 50 years of scientific illustration about prehistoric humans. Indeed, the common conception of "caveman" comes from that one fossil. Hobbits might be some already known species of humanoid but be afflicted with some disease.