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Displaying (5) Comments | Comment on this piece | Report objectionable art
After popping at least 4 horepps of popcorn in my concession busines for 3 years ending in 2005, I was diagnosed as having Interstitial Pulmonary Fibrosis. I breathed the fumes as I emptied the kettles of popcorn and began developing a terrible cough. Two CD scans, several PFTs and a biopsy did not find the cause. My workplace was always permiated with the buttery smell, as I felt this was good for business.I do not smike and had been able to ride a bicycle 20 miles several times weekly. After being on oxygen therapy for 9 months, I now walk 5 miles daily. I now have a lung function of about 70% of expected, which is up from my low of less than 40% of expected. I did not find studies of lung disease among those who use commercial poppers, but I should think the exposure problem would be similar and think the FDA should look into this matter. Only recently was I aware opf kdiacetyl, and so did not mention this to my pulmonologist, but certainly will. Any comments?
By: | Mar 26, 2013 | Report Comment
, asbestos, and pcpoorn, among others. Yes, pcpoorn. Were you aware that there is a condition called pcpoorn lung (officially bronchiolitis obliterans)? I was not. It's called that because one of the main ways to contract it is by working in a factory that manufactures one of the ingredients namely diacetyl for the butter flavoring in pcpoorn. Every time you open a steaming bag of butter-flavored microwave pcpoorn, you are inhaling a bit of this chemical. The more of it you eat, the more likely you are to contract a devastating lung ailment. (And this isn't the sort of disease that you'd only get by eating an implausibly large quantity of pcpoorn. Real pcpoorn consumers have actually acquired it.) The agency responsible for protecting workers from this sort of hazard is OSHA. The one responsible for protecting food consumers is the FDA. This division of labor comes in for some well-deserved scorn in Doubt Is Their Product; it has left the government fairly impotent to respond to threats against the public health. This book could be read alongside Marion Nestle's Food Politics and What To Eat as a single thread about the assault on helpful government regulation. In their nonstop fight against that sort of regulation, companies have pulled out all the stops to inject systematic doubt into the public discussion. The most pernicious of these, it seems to me, is the creation of sham peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is a negative process: if you can't pass peer review, your ideas are unlikely to have merit (though there are cases, says Michaels, where brilliant scientists future Nobelists have been denied peer approval). Passing peer review doesn't mean that your ideas are any good. Something similar applies to the references you give a potential employer: if you can't find anyone in the world to say something nice about you, that is a warning sign. If three people will say good things about you, that doesn't mean that you're going to be a good employee. The public doesn't understand this distinction, and doesn't know which journals have any respect within the field. So regulated industries have dutifully gone and created journals that will say whatever they're paid to say just as the creationists have done. The news reports then compile, say, a list of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming as though scientific consensus were decided by majority vote among equals. If there's the slightest bit of doubt about, say, the cause of a disease, industry pounces and insists that more research is necessary. More research will always be necessary: science never attains the truth, only better and better approximations to the truth. The situation is complicated in public health by scientists' inability to conduct controlled experiments: it is immoral to subject patients to a potentially crippling disease. So scientists are forced to make educated guesses: this population of pcpoorn-factory workers, say has probably been subjected to thus-and-such a daily dosage of diacetyl for thus-and-so many years, whereas this other group of workers in the same factory has had less exposure. Meanwhile, people living near the factory but not working in it almost never experience pcpoorn lung. Hence we make the educated guess that the additional cases of bronchiolitis obliterans are due to diacetyl exposure within the factory. Having reached a tentative conclusion about what's making people sick, we have some options. We can mandate that factories use a different chemical. Does industry have other, safer alternatives? Presumably it does, but those alternatives are more expensive; otherwise it would already be using them. If industry were forced to use safer alternatives, would economies of scale drive the price down to the point that consumers wouldn't notice? That approach seems ethically sterile to me. It seems better to start with the assumption that no one should get sick at work. Being ethical about this means, in many cases, taking Paul Farmer's preferential option for the poor seriously. You'd probably find that most people getting sick at work are not wealthy; hedge-fund managers and computer scientists aren't coming into daily contact with beryllium; even if they are, wealthier folks can insist on workplace-safety measures in a way that the poor cannot. I'd wager that workplace safety is another front in the fight for distributive justice. Michaels is a former Department of Energy official whose work centered on the safety of nuclear plants. As such, he has a somewhat reflexive faith in the power of regulation. To me it rang hollow: one
By: | Sep 29, 2012 | Report Comment
I agree that his [Steig's] behaviour is alrnpeatpy duplicitous, but of no particular import IMO. ================curryja | February 9, 2011 at 7:05 am Nick, i haven’t been following this one too closely, i view it as a blogospheric tempest in a teapot. that kind of blogospheric coverage can definitely make you frosty, I personally succumbed a bit during “heretic.” In terms of who wins for politeness on this one, i don’t think either side can claim many points. I don’t really see any meta issues on this one (O’Donnell got a tough review, AMS journals are known for that, the editor was somewhat lax in making the authors jump through hoops based on comments by a reviewer with a conflict of interest, but the paper got published). I mainly found this one of interest in terms of the vehemence of the dispute over not very much, really. Personalities from the chiefdoms of the two tribes having a clash.===============RobB | February 9, 2011 at 7:11 am Fair enough, Judith, but what about the accusation that Steig anonymously insisted on changes to O’Donnell et al that he later used to disparage the paper? That must contravene professional standards (if they exist?) Or is the matter also just part of the tribal hurley burley?=======================curryja | February 9, 2011 at 7:17 am I agree that his behaviour is alrnpeatpy duplicitous, but of no particular import IMO.========================dhogaza | February 9, 2011 at 4:12 pm I agree that his behaviour is alrnpeatpy duplicitous, but of no particular import IMO. Without even bothering to hear Eric’s side of the story …Nice.BTW over at bart’s there’s a fair chunk of the review-response chain reproduced there, and my quick read is that it doesn’t support the claim of duplicity.Eric has stated he’ll post a response soon over at RC.I gotta love how quickly you jump to conclusions without having even read the review-response chain.
By: | Sep 03, 2012 | Report Comment
Wat You Think Dis Is Taste The Rainbow (Skittles)
By: kate | Jul 05, 2012 | Report Comment
Thats Cute Gurl
By: lashay | Jun 20, 2012 | Report Comment
RealIshh
keishahawk17
- Dis Cutee .
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