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Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault On Science Threatens Your Health (2008)

by David Michaels(Favorite Author)

4 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

019530067X (ISBN13: 9780195300673)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

review 1: "Doubt is Their Product" is a well researched and scholarly book. It is also tells a very sad story. The government we trust to keep us safe has put the foxes in charge of the henhouses. OSHA, for example, has been so intimidated that it has quit trying to protect us. The nuclear weapons industry has contaminated the countryside and used security as an excuse to hide the fact. The FDA has little to no funding to protect us from drugs with serious side effects. If you vote, you must read this book. If you work near chemicals, you would be an idiot not to read it.Ralph Hermansen 02/28/09
review 2: This is the best book I have come across on the subject of corporate influence on science. Prof. Michaels details in case after case how corporations have used the "to... morebacco strategy" to muddy the waters and delay government regulation of harmful substances. The case studies -- secondhand tobacco smoke, lead, benzene, beryllium, diacetyl, the list goes on and on -- start to blur together, so consistent is the gameplan.The main scientific takeaway from the book is this: epidemiology is difficult to do correctly and very easy to break. A statistically significant connection between worker exposure and cancer takes years of work. Corporations have become adept at "re-analyzing" scientific studies to create false negatives and routinely put out scientific reports written by Ph.D.s that "sound like science" but serve to obscure rather than reveal. Michaels describes the rise of "product defense firms" that brag on their websites that they can delay regulation of your harmful product for years.Depressing stuff. But the good news is that David Michaels has been tapped by President Obama to lead the beleaguered Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ... if he can survive a blizzard of right-wing accusations and still be confirmed. He is definitely the right guy for the job - during the Clinton years he was the architect of a highly successful DOE program to compensate workers from the government's weapons labs for their exposure to toxic substances. The story of this successful, bi-partisan program is the final chapter of the books, and is a hopeful coda to what comes before. less

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