Monthly Archives: August 2012

Toxicology, almost always a lie in the THR context

Posted on 31 August 2012 by | 6 Comments

posted by Carl V Phillips

We now close the case on Ellen Hahn for a while, having pretty clearly debunked basically everything she says about e-cigarettes.  While she is probably the most prolific and dangerous anti-THR liar of the year, she will probably end up being a flash in the pan.  When I first started working on THR, the “Ellen Hahn” role was played by the University of Florida dentist, Scott Tomar.  Remember him?  I didn’t think so.

But there are others who have been using disinformation to dissuade people from THR for a decade and are still doing so.  One of them is University of Minnesota toxicologist, Stephen Hecht.  Unlike Hahn, he is a real researcher, but like Hahn, he is mostly just on a crusade against THR.  (Hahn is a researcher only if the sense that the Japanese commercial whaling fleet is really doing research, as they claim.  Both are cases of someone doing what they want, in violation of regulations, trying to excuse their behavior as “research” by keeping a record of what happens.)

Hecht’s latest lies about the risks from smokeless tobacco are found in this report, which I will directly address starting with my next post.  Today I will focus on a more general point about toxicology.

Toxicology can basically be thought of as trying to figure out whether particular chemical exposures will cause cancer, acute poisoning, or other bad effects, but without actually observing whether the exposure does cause cancer etc.  Instead of observing what we really want to know, it tries to predict it by looking at the effects of chemicals on cells, tissue, and non-human animals.   (Toxicology also helps us figure out why something is causing its effects and how to perhaps do something about that.)  If we have the information we really want — about what the exposure actually does to real people who are really exposed — then that is called epidemiology.

It should be obvious from this that if we have decent epidemiology about whether an exposure actually does cause a disease, then the toxicology that predicts whether the exposure causes the disease is no longer informative.  It is kind of like looking at last week’s weather forecast to determine whether it is raining right now, rather than looking out the window.

Obviously there is a lot of value in weather forecasting, and there is a lot of value in trying to figure out whether something will kill people without actually killing people to find out.  Both are imprecise, but neither one is inherently junk science so long as its limitations are duly acknowledged.  But almost any time toxicology is invoked in the THR context, it turns out to be junk science lies.

There are the Hahn-type lies (see the previous posts that are tagged with “chemicals“) in which she claims that any tiny trace of a sometimes-toxic chemical causes disease.  Presumably Hecht, as a toxicologist, would be among the first to label this junk science.  But then there are the Hecht lies, wherein he has spent a good part of his career claiming that we should believe speculative toxicological conclusions about smokeless tobacco causing cancer, despite having epidemiologic evidence that shows that such speculation is incorrect.

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Striking back at anti-THR lies and liars

Posted on 30 August 2012 by | Leave a comment

posted by Carl V Phillips

We conclude Ellen Hahn Week with a mass debunking of her lies.  Today, CASAA released to the public a letter that we sent to the president of the University of Kentucky and the attorney general of Kentucky, calling for an investigation of Hahn’s actions.  Here is our press release announcing this, which also announces the creation of this blog (but you know about that already).  The focus of the letter was a particular action by Hahn, in which she used anti-THR lies, coupled with intimidation tactics, to try to trick a local hotel into canceling a scheduled vape meet.

If you like this blog and can spare a few minutes more than it takes to read it, you will want to check out both of those links.  Ok, it is a lot of minutes, but should be worth it.  This is really not just about one liar; it is an announcement that THR advocates — all of us, I hope! — are going to stop trying to politely correct the lies, but are going to start fighting back.

The letter speaks for itself, and it is 26 dense pages about Hahn’s lies and trickery, so rather than try to excerpt or summarize, I will just incorporate it here by reference.  The part that is most important for the big picture is her scientific disinformation, similar to her lies that we have already documented here.  Most of that is concentrated in Appendix B of the letter, which reads like entries in the blog (and will probably all end up here eventually).

A few others have already posted about this.

Happy reading.

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Scary scary formaldehyde

Posted on 29 August 2012 by | 1 Comment

posted by Carl V Phillips with analysis from Elaine Keller and input from CASAA board

We finish up our debunking of Ellen Hahn’s project “Lie to College Students” with her claim,

In the cartridge:  Formaldehyde.  Highly toxic to all animals, including you.  Good for embalming dead bodies.  Causes cancer.

This is obviously another example of the same word games that were analyzed in previous posts, so we will not repeat those points.

The interesting thing about this point is that the chemistry studies of e-cigarettes do find that of all the contaminants, formaldehyde might be the one that is most worth trying to reduce.  Unlike the other chemicals that Hahn mentions, which are at tiny fractions of 1% of what is considered the hazardous level, formaldehyde might be in the neighborhood of 1% of what is considered hazardous level.  Of course, this “merely” 100-fold margin is hardly a cause for worry, and the quantity is similar to the exposure we get from other sources.  (There is also speculation that some of the formaldehyde measured in lab studies is from the vaper, not the vapor — the human body emits a measurable amount of this horrible scary toxic chemical.)  It is certainly a lie to say that this contamination causes cancer, as Hahn claims.

But among all of the trivial contaminants, this trivial contaminant might be worth a bit of engineering effort.  I do not know enough about the chemical engineering to know how practical or easy reducing it would be.  An honest scientist or public health advocate might say “this is unlikely to cause health problems, but it theoretically could be causing a tiny bit of needless risk, so maybe something can be done here to make these low-risk products even lower risk.”

But this is like saying, “seat belts seem to produce a bit more bruising near the clavicle compared to elsewhere when they prevent someone from getting killed in a major crash, so we might want to focus some effort to improve that part of the seat belt.”   You would have to very stupid and/or very dishonest to reason, “A bit of bruising near the clavicle?!!! OMG! Bruises can be fatal! Don’t use seat belts!”

 

A short post today, but we will make up for it tomorrow, when we publish 26 pages about Hahn’s lies.  Stay tuned.

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Beware: e-cigarette vapor contains (gasp!) air.

Posted on 28 August 2012 by | 1 Comment

posted by Carl V. Phillips

We continue Ellen Hahn week here at Anti-THR Lies (not to be confused with Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, since only one of them is about a single-minded evolutionary throwback whose actions are likely to kill hundreds of people every year if left unchecked).  We already addressed the rhetoric from her anti-e-cigarette poster, which is designed to trick people into being irrationally fearful about common chemicals.  This includes, specifically, the common (as in: found in pretty much everything in the biosphere) organic chemicals, acetone and xylene.  But how much of those chemicals is actually found in e-cigarette liquid or vapor?

The particular source that Hahn cites in her recent advocacy paper (which is the only reference in the poster and is consistent with other study results) found a concentration of less than 1/1000th of NIH’s recommended exposure limit for acetone in the air, close to 1/10,000th of the OSHA limit.  There are arguments that these limits are a bit too high, especially for some sensitive people, but not 1000 times too high.  Moreover, those US government specified limits are for someone’s average exposure throughout the day, so the exposure from vaping needs to be averaged across the entire day for comparison, making it far less than a one millionth of the exposure that is considered worrisome.   The ratios for xylene are a bit lower still.

In case Hahn simply does not understand what these numbers mean, the author of the study she cited (and thus what she implicitly claims is a sufficient source of information about this topic unambiguously concluded that these his results show there is no unexpected risk from this exposure.   So Hahn has no room to plead ignorance.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate that Hahn’s claim — that people should worry about e-cigarettes because of these two chemicals — is a blatant lie, however, is not a comparison to recommended maximum limits, but a comparison to air.  The concentrations of these chemicals in e-cigarette vapor — again, using those 2008 numbers — was only a few times higher than what is found in the outdoor air that most of us breathe.  A lot of what was measured was from the air, in other words, especially because the indoor air in a research facility might have concentrations many times as high as outdoor air.

Since these chemicals are at only slightly higher concentrations than the air, and since someone’s total volume of vapor intake is so small, when someone takes a pull on an e-cigarette and then tops it off with a full breath, most of the acetone and xylene in their airways is from the air, not the e-cigarette.  Someone who doubles their breathing rate for a minute or two, say by walking briskly or speaking, takes in more extra acetone and xylene than they would from a vaping session.

What is more, a more recent study found that the concentration of xylene the vapor was indistinguishable from that of the air.  That is, basically all of the measured xylene was contributed by the primary ingredient of vapor (air) rather than the additional contributions from the e-cigarette itself.

If Hahn was really worried about acetone exposure, she would be trying to shut down nail salons (where it often exceeds OSHA standards for the workers, and customers and innocent passers-by are exposed) not vaping.  But, of course, she does not really care.  She is just hunting for sciency-sounding anti-THR lies.

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