Necessary Roughness

Saccharin has been known for decades to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Your answer may rightly be, “So what?”

Gilbert Ross, M.D. writing for The American Spectator, reports that federal risk assessors no longer trust high-dosage animal testing to predict what will happen in humans.

Forty-plus experts in various relevant fields reviewed our publication and agreed with our conclusions: high-dose animal tests do not predict human toxicity or cancer risk. Yet, when we tried to get someone in the regulatory bureaucracy to acknowledge this fact — well known to toxicologists for decades — we were met with either stony silence or the disingenuous, “Well, we know, but we’ve been doing it this way for years, and we have nothing to replace it with.” Not a resounding endorsement for a system that has cost our economy billions in regulatory compliance efforts over decades.

I am thinking of one family friend who had to shut down his extermination business when his cost-effective insecticide was ruled as unsafe. I’m curious how many other businesses were affected by regulation based on bad science.