Geoffrey Kabat
ACSH
New York, NY, United States
Contact Geoffrey
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Past articles by Geoffrey:
Claims That Criticism of IARC Are Industry-Driven Do IARC More Harm Than Good
Neil Pearce, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has risen to the defense of the controversial International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), but falling back on hollow claims of IARC's superiority will do little to dispel the serious questions about the Agency's process. Pearce opens his piece by endorsing last week’s ruling by a California court finding that… → Read More
IARC Is Changing Its Preamble But Will That Mean A Change In Its Credibility?
Last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which operates under the auspices of the U.N. World Health Organisation, announced it would solicit comments from interested parties prior to holding an Advisory Group meeting in November to propose revisions to its Preamble. The preamble articulates the mission and methods of the IARC Monographs program and an update has been… → Read More
Dissension Emerges Over The Results Of A 30-Million-Dollar Federal Study of BPA
Last week, a day-long meeting was held at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina to discuss the results of a 30-million-dollar federal study designed to assess the safety of bisphenol A, or BPA. The study, CLARITY-BPA, represents a collaboration between two camps that have long been at odds over the safety of BPA: scientists and… → Read More
California's Latest Precautionary Move Against "Cell Phone Radiation"
California's issuing of guidelines to protect cell phone users is an example of extreme precautionary pandering to fears that have little grounding in science or reality. → Read More
Male fertility likely declining, but we haven't figured out why
Studies tell us that difficult-to-measure male fertility has dipped in recent decades. But with many unknowns, we need to resist the urge to settle on easy explanations. → Read More
Getting to the bottom of reports of declining male fertility
Studies suggest that western men are experiencing declining sperm counts. But more extensive research is needed to determine if it's true -- and why. → Read More
Are sperm counts declining? What's the role of 'endocrine disruptors'?
The science community is divided over whether reports of declining sperm counts in men is actually occurring. One explanation--exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals--seems particularly weak. → Read More
Geoffrey Kabat's 'Getting Risk Right' on science media and good vs. poor quality studies
In Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks...looking across the current landscape of environmental epidemiologic research and → Read More
Environmental health: Study linking chemicals and pollution to increased cancers misses mark
Albert Einstein epidemiologist: A hyped study found lung cancer in men DECREASES as environmental quality gets worse but there is no pattern in women. So how exactly are pollutants causing a rash of cancers? → Read More
Four Flaws In Assessing The Influence Of The Environment On Cancer
Last week, a colleague sent me an article in the Daily News titled “Increased cancer rate in US linked to bad environment” and asked my opinion of it. The opening sentence read, “Improving the worst environments in the US could prevent 39 in every 100,000 cancer deaths.” The Daily News item refers to an article published in the journal Cancer, which is published by the American Cancer Society,… → Read More
Is your sperm being zapped by chemicals in the environment?
Nick Kristof is an accomplished reporter... when he ventures into issues relating to environmental exposures and their putative health effects, his critica → Read More
Michael Lewis' New Book Carries An Essential Message For Our Time
As he demonstrated in books like Moneyball, Boomerang and The Big Short, Michael Lewis has a genius for finding stories about people who view reality from an unusual angle and telling these stories in a compulsively readable way. In his new book The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, his [...] → Read More
Ken Burns' Magisterial "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies"
The 6-hour Ken Burns and Barak Goodman television documentary “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,” shown earlier this week on PBS, is an extraordinary event and demonstrates what television can deliver at its best. Based on the best-selling 2010 book by Siddhartha Mukherjee The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography [...] → Read More
How Many Scientists Does It Take To Squelch A Critic? Hint: 124
In late February, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives published a curious document entitled “IARC Monographs: Forty Years of Evaluating Carcinogenic Hazards to Humans.” The paper lists 124 authors, many of whom are either current or former employees of IARC while others are epidemiologists from academic and other institutions all over [...] → Read More
Most Cancers May Simply Be Due To Bad Luck
It’s not every day that a scientific paper forces us to reexamine long-held views on a topic of great importance. Such a paper came out last week in the journal Science. In the space of two-and-a-half pages, the mathematician Cristian Tomasetti and cancer geneticist Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins School of [...] → Read More
When Anomalous, And Almost Certainly Wrong, Results Get The Most Attention
The amazing rendezvous last week of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft with a comet 317 million miles from the Earth after a ten-year journey depended on the astrophysicists and engineers who built the hardware and programmed its trajectory in keeping with the laws of celestial mechanics. They would have [...] → Read More
The Alternative Universe In Which BPA Is A Major Health Threat
With an estimated 40 percent of Americans, according to a Harvard poll, worried that they could contract Ebola, two days ago the journal PLoS ONE published a paper which claims to show that handling of cash register receipts puts you a risk of myriad diseases. The paper is from a group [...] → Read More
The Raging Controversy Over BPA Shows No Signs Of Abating
But that doesn’t mean that the two opposing sides have equal merit. In her “Poison Pen” blog in last week’s New York Times, the science writer Deborah Blum calls attention to new research that raises alarming questions about adverse effects on the female reproductive organs from exposure to BPA (bisphenol-A). Her [...] → Read More
The New York Times Revisits The "Debate" Over Electromagnetic Fields, Reviving Baseless Fears, While Ignoring What Has Been Learned
Yesterday, in its Science Times section, the New York Times published a piece by Kenneth Chang titled “Debate Continues on Hazards of Electromagnetic Waves.” The article appears under a new heading “Time Travel,” an occasional column that “explores topics covered in the Science Times 25 years ago to see what [...] → Read More
Do We Really Have to Worry About Shower Curtains Causing Weight Gain?
I’m afraid we can look forward to a lot more of this kind of nonsense. Several days ago an article titled “Is Your Shower Curtain Making You Fat?” appeared in the magazine Spry and was then reprinted in the Dodge City Daily Globe. The article drew readers’ attention to the dangers [...] → Read More