Steve Milloy
The new study the Consumer Product Safety Commission wants to rely on to ban gas stoves is classic junk science.
Here is the study. The abstract is below.
Here is a quick summary of the some of study’s principle flaws, in no particular order:
- It’s not actual research on children. It is a meta-analysis of previously published (and ignored) studies — a study of otherwise unpersuasive studies. The authors did a literature search for previous epidemiologic studies on gas stoves and asthma in kids and then just mixed those results together in an effort to contrive statistical signioficance. This is a bogus technique for a number of reasons including publications bias in the component studies — i.e., studies with null results aren’t published.
- The study results, including the component studies, are weak statistical associations — i.e., noise range correlations. The study results, likely including the component studies, are not statistically significant either.
- Asthma is an allergic disease. There are no allergens in natural gas. So the study has no biological plausibility. No one knows what causes asthma in children and so competing causes could not be ruled out.
- The claim that gas stoves are responsible for 12% of childhood asthma – an epidemioogic concept called “attributable risk” – is entirely bogus because epidemiological studies can only be used to associated exposures with disease. They cannot be used to determine risk of disease because (1) the underlying data is not representative of the population; and (2) epidemiologic studies cannot be used by themselves to determine cause-and-effect relationships.
If none of that means anything to you. you need to read “Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against health Scare and Scams.”
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I am reminded of the quaint descriptor: Lying, liars who lie. Cheers –
I would love to see a comparison of indoor air pollution from cooking with natural gas relative to pollution from smoking weed which is definitely on the rise in the US. Perhaps natural gas appliances could be rated in terms of doobie or bong hit equivalents. Surely some researcher will be willing to take on the challenge … for the children of course!
What about all the other chemicals we put in the air inside our homes?
Plug in air fresheners? Aerosol air fresheners? Window cleaners? Countertop cleaners? Disinfectants? etc.
If you can smell it, it’s in the air.
(And some things you can’t smell are in the air.)
This is how it works: there have been a couple of ridiculous headlines contorting the results of irrelevant studies, then there will be more poorly conducted studies, more headlines, more funding, then the consensus will be announced, and the science will be settled. And gas stoves will go the way of the incandescent light bulb.
One of the studies I saw referenced by this tested “toxin” levels in a kitchen fully sealed with plastic.
“No one knows what causes asthma in children”
Is the v- word allowed?