The trial lawyer outfit Environmental Working Group paid to publish a claim that a for-fee group paid by them 'detected' chemicals that a few fringe epidemiologists correlate to cancer - in animals - and therefore humans are at risk.
Newsweek doesn't have any science journalists so they dutifully repeated it, but if you want an answer you can trust, rather than corporate media, here are the facts.
1. Any chemical at high enough dose can harm you. That includes H2O. 'The dose makes the poison.'
2. Epidemiologists either ignore dose - they just ask people on a survey if they've ever used Dawn detergent or whatever, then they see how many people got a disease. That's not science because they don't control for anything else that may have resulted in cancer, like family history or smoking or alcohol. They think surveys mean truth, and they rarely do.
3. Environmental Working Group is composed of trial lawyers, they employ no scientists. Their only test results are work-for-hire by unaccredited labs.
4. Animal testing that sketchy epidemiologists consider legitimate - because they are interested in finding a "hazardous" chemical - uses 5 orders of magnitude for dose. Which means 10,000 times as much as you'd get.
5. Once they have epidemiologists from some questionable group, the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France or Ramazzini Institute in Italy, calling something a hazard, lawyers hire a lab to detect it in useful products.
6. Lawyers at places like Environmental Working Group sue.
That's it, that's the science story.
Lawyer's are waiting to sue 'at the drop of a rat' and demand a trial by jury because they hope jurors won't know that rats are not tiny people. They share so little biology that animal studies, like epidemiology, are put over in the exploratory pile. Not the science one.
