tl;dr. Researcher finds out they were off by a factor of 10, responds that “this does not impact our results and our recommendations remain the same.”
Dean Eckles sent me an email, subject line, “order-of-magnitude errors that don’t affect the conclusions,” pointing to this news article from Joseph Brean:
Plastics rarely make news like this . . . the media uptake was enthusiastic on a paper published in October in the peer-reviewed journal Chemosphere.
“Your cool black kitchenware could be slowly poisoning you, study says. Here’s what to do,” said the LA Times. “Yes, throw out your black spatula,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Salon was most blunt: “Your favorite spatula could kill you,” it said.
The study, by researchers at the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future, sought to determine whether black plastic household products sold in the U.S. contain brominated flame retardants, fire-resistant chemicals that are added to plastics for use in electronics, such as televisions, to prevent accidental fires. . . .
The study estimated that using contaminated kitchenware could cause a median intake of 34,700 nanograms per day of Decabromodiphenyl ether, known as BDE-209. That is far more than the bodily intake previously estimated from other modes, such as ingesting dust.
OK, so far, so good. But then:
The trouble is that, in the study’s section on “Health and Exposure Concerns,” the researchers said this number, 34,700, “would approach” the reference dose given by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. . . .
The paper correctly gives the reference dose for BDE-209 as 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, but calculates this into a limit for a 60-kilogram adult of 42,000 nanograms per day. So, as the paper claims, the estimated actual exposure from kitchen utensils of 34,700 nanograms per day is more than 80 per cent of the EPA limit of 42,000.
Did you catch that? Look carefully:
That sounds bad. But 60 times 7,000 is not 42,000. It is 420,000. This is what [McGill University’s] Joe Schwarcz noticed. The estimated exposure is not even a tenth of the reference dose. That does not sound as bad.
Indeed.
We all make mistakes, and some of them make their way into journals. I can see how the reviewers of the article could’ve not caught this particular error, with all those zeros floating around in the numbers. It’s less excusable for the authors to have missed it—I guess that part of the problem is that the incorrect number fit their story so well. When you come up with a result that doesn’t accord with the story you want to tell, you’re inclined to check it If the result is a perfect fit, you might not even give it a second look.
How to avoid this in the future?
Schwarcz, who directs McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, offers some helpful insights for avoiding this sort of error:
Schwarcz does not generally like measurements of risk expressed in percentages. Absolute numbers tend to be more useful, as in this study. He gives the example of a lottery ticket. If you have one lottery ticket, your chances of winning are, say, one in a million. If you buy another, your chances of winning have increased by 100 per cent, which sounds like a lot until you realize they are still just two in a million.
“Risk analysis is a sketchy business in the first place, very difficult to do, especially if you don’t express units properly,” Schwarcz said. “You can make things sound worse.”
There was also no need to use nanograms as the unit of measurement in this study, Schwarcz said, which gave unit amounts in the tens of thousands. The more common micrograms would have given units in the tens.
“It’s a common thing in scientific literature, especially in ones that try to call attention to some kind of toxin,” Schwarcz said.
Scaling is really important, and often people seem to be going out of their way to use numbers that are hard to interpret. Or, they just use whatever default scaling comes to them, without reflecting on how they could do better. A few years ago we discussed some graphs of annual death rates that were given in units such as “1,000 deaths per 100,000.” It’s hard to get intuition on a number like that. It would’ve been so easy to just do everything per 100, and then that number would be a much more interpretable 1%. (About 1% of Americans die each year, which makes sense given demographics.)
Did the factor-of-10 error matter?
From the news article:
Lead author Megan Liu, science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, described the mistake as a “typo” and said her co-authors have submitted a correction to the journal. The error remains in the online version but Liu said she anticipates it will be updated soon.
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”
Hmmm, maybe. The news article also states, “it appears the study’s hypothesis is correct, that black plastic recycled out of electronic devices, mostly in Asia, is getting back into the American supply chain for household kitchen items, including spatulas. So if you’re keen on eliminating these chemicals in any amount, chucking the black plastic kitchenware is a start, even if not as effective as the erroneous calculation suggests.”
It still seems wrong to say, “Our recommendations remain the same,” if their estimate of risk is off by a factor of 10.
Look at it another way. Suppose someone else had done a study and found that the level of exposure was “8% of the reference dose, thus, a potential concern,” but they’d done the calculation wrong, and the level was really 80% of the reference dose. Then I assume that the folks at Toxic-Free Future would’t say that the recommendations remain the same, right? They’d say the exposure had been underestimated by a factor of 10 and that’s a big deal!
To put it another way, comparisons are symmetric. If you say that an exposure of 80% of the recommended dose is 10 times as bad as an exposure of 8% of the recommended dose, then the reverse should be true as well, that an exposure of 8% is 1/10 as bad as an exposure of 80%.
Does this change the recommendation? Yes, I’d say it does, in part. The individual recommendation—throw away your black plastic spatula—might not change, but the policy recommendation would change, because policy recommendations are not just directional, they also include a sense of urgency or priority, which depends on magnitude.
I’ll return to this issue in a future post. It’s an important issue that arises in many examples.
There is an old Jewish joke which has some sort of relationship, at least in my mind, to being off by a factor of 10 and then sloughing off the criticism:
A person was found guilty and was about to be executed.
First Person: “Because he’s Jewish, he never had a chance.”
Second Person: “But, he’s not Jewish.”
First Person: “What difference does that make.”
“Then I assume that the folks at Toxic-Free Future would’t say that the recommendations remain the same, right? They’d say the exposure had been underestimated by a factor of 10 and that’s a big deal!”
Nice new heuristic in the spirit of the time reversal heuristic.
Dean:
I like that! “The Error-Reversal Heuristic.” I just added it to the lexicon. It goes with the Time-Reversal Heuristic and the Status-Reversal Heuristic, both of which already had their places there.
1. Two of the authors are from “Toxic Free Future”. Seems like they might have an ax to grind. Just a Bayesian take…
2. It’s not clear what the proper corrective action is in this case. Should flame retardants be removed from flame risk items (like electronics)? Or should less recycling, more virgin plastic be done in kitchen utensils.
3. Still kind of an interesting paper! Law of unintended consequences.
Anon:
A couple years ago we discussed the general issue of academic research and advocacy. No easy answers on that one. I remember once talking with someone who did research on privatized prisons. He was a political conservative and thought that privatized prisons were a great idea. Other people who work in that area have strong views in the other direction. And then there are other takes such as to reduce prison and have more people under house arrests, constrained by electronic monitors, etc. It makes sense that just about everyone doing research in this area will have strong views, as that would be a strong motivation to work on the topic in the first place. How can an outsider make use of that knowledge when evaluating the research? I’m not sure.
Agreed. It’s not an easy one. But you can definitely at least have your “watch out” awareness when research comes in from an NGO, on a politically charge topic. Like I’m pretty wary of peak oil papers by David Hughes from the “Post Carbon Institute”. Especially when he has a record of underestimating production repeatedly.
R1 academics can be prone as well, of course. But in general, I feel a bit better with an academic. Especially in the sciences. But I don’t 100% dismiss or trust anyone. Just Bayesian grist for the mill.
Steve Sailer had a remark about the Nobel prize in economics, where he said, “you don’t have Republican or Democrat chemists”. I mean, I’m sure you do. But if someone is getting an award for figuring out how to do better spectroscopy or the like, it’s not something where you worry about who he voted for. Of course, perhaps this is an example of a political chemist!
Anon:
I don’t know about chemistry, but there have been many political biologists, most notoriously Lysenko and then more recently that wacky French dude, with lots of others in the meantime. I’m not just talking about biologists who did politics on the side, but biologists whose politics seem to have directly affected their biology work.
Yeah, there are topics where it can come in, as for instance toxicology. Or medicine, especially on more topical aspects.
As for Lysenko, sure. But never said it was 100%. I mean I don’t think that political angles are that common in the overall bunch of people doing papers on cells or whatever.
You see it a little in zoology some endangered species and the like, where there is a motivation to overclassify (splitter versus lumper) because in general different species are covered politically and different subspecies are not. But if anything, I think the normal academic tendency to want to get resume bullets motivates this sort of thing. E.g. I discovered the left-handed flubbersquint or whatever, when really it was just reclassification of a population. Very few of these “discovered a new species” claims are very different, large species like finding kangaroos or the like.
You see this a lot with the tendency to promote clades as separate species, and the abandonment of the more functional definition of co-propogation of healthy offspring. And of course, there is no “perfect” species definition, since there are ring species and the like even with the functional definition. But also, the more you think about it, classification/naming of animals is sort of a human subjective thing. Not like learning about atomic particles or even some aspect of cellular biology that was unknown.
I did a Ph.D. in chemistry at an R1 university. Of the 20-odd PIs and 30-odd kids in my “class”, I can’t remember a single one doing a project that had sufficient policy implications to be worried about the impact on their publications. They might make mistakes. And they might exaggerate the novelty and societal impact of the findings, but I don’t remember a single time where I was worried someone might have his thumb on the scale for political reasons.
And I am pretty savvy to watch out for such things. And was from the ~20% Republican chemists, vice the 80% Democrats. But I really never even got a bad vibe that someone might be juicing the findings to make Democrats look better or Republicans look worse. I never even had a single Bayesian hair on the back of my neck go up (as might happen if a gay guy was doing a paper on gay face or priming or whatever). And this was the case for everyone I knew in physics and material sciences also.
I mean sure the funding agencies might be funding things that had some political/societal relevance (battery materials or solar cells or curing cancer)…but I never even got the slightest feeling about worrying that politics was driving a reported finding. It was just that was what NSF was funding. Grantsmanship and careerism sure in the wording of findings (and grant applications). And even that not that bad, but the normal amount you got used to seeing and could read through.
Heck…if anything most of these cats wanted to discover new laws of nature, not do something economically relevant. That was just a façade they played to get grants. I freaked them out at my defense, when I said I actually MEAN IT when I (quite lamely) hoped something useful for US military forces might come of my research. They were explaining to me…”no, we just say that…you’ve read our grants too literally”.
Anon:
Just the same, Andrew has a good point. Today there are surely thousands of chemists and physicists working, in manner of speaking, to pass the Green New Deal. They have discovered that, statistically speaking, almost anything can be inferred, and thus can now avoid the pesky reality of having to show something is actually true. It just needs to be manufactured with complex statistical models that are tweaked within the bounds of (highly streateched) conditions and (innumerable stated and unstated) assumptions (never made explicit) until they tune into a disaster, then it’s off to the castle wall to sound the trumpets.
This is hardly a new modus operendi in academia, so it’s not surprising. It’s just at the moment being exploited for a more rewarding end than anything that was available to academia in the past. Climate activists like to say climate scientists and advocates aren’t getting rich but it’s safe to say James Hansen and Bill McKibben have sold a lot of books. And it’s not surprising that they might want to do something like ban people who offer a competing viewpoint, so as to increase their revenue.
I mean, lets face it, it’s hard to make a rocket that lands or for god’s sake a tower that catches rockets! or even a car hat runs on batteries – even if you’re a physicist or a chemist! But it’s easy to make up a bunch of BS about disasters and sell books. So you can see the appeal: a global warming book? $600 computer and one year’s work (if that). Creating a reusable rocket? Risking millions of your own money and 15 years work. Right?
Lol it’s much more reliably profitable and a lot less work to get a job at SpaceX or tesla than to work in academia and hope you write a book that goes viral. Everyone I know who’s done so after their PhD or who dropped out of their PhD program to do so wishes they dropped out sooner since their life is so much better
Not the same anon:
Different people do what they are situated to do.
Bill McKibben was trained to be a writer and appears to have been upper middle class all his life, with enough flexibility to write books that, even if they sold pretty well, I don’t think made him rich. He was never going to design rockets (not something he had the skill set for) or buy a car company or hire someone to design rockets for him (not having the required money or connections). My impression is that the sales of his books allowed him to keep writing books and doing political activism. According to his wikipedia page, McKibben currently teaches at a college, but he wasn’t coming out of academia, he was coming out of the publishing industry.
James Hansen got a Ph.D. in physics and did research on earth science. He worked at NASA for many years and I suppose he could’ve worked on the rocket-design teams, but I guess that’s not what interested him the most. With a Ph.D. in physics, you’re qualified to do all sorts of things. For that matter, I was considering getting a Ph.D. in physics, and I too could’ve chosen a career designing rockets, had this been my interest. I was more interested in statistics, and I guess Hansen was more interested in climate science. Over the decades, Hansen has shifted more of his efforts to political activism. According to his wikipedia page, he’s published one book, which I doubt has sold a lot of copies–it’s a children’s book. Given that he did not work on rocket design himself despite having the general qualifications, I doubt that he would’ve been interested in hiring someone to design rockets for him, but in any case it does not see that he had the required money or connections that would’ve facilitated that.
Non the same anon –
Meanwhile, the aforereferenced engineer tweets nonsensical political advocacy to hundreds of millions of followers and spends 1/4 $billion to bend the ear of the president to engineer policies related to his government contracts.
The inverted scale of your portrayal is striking.
Joshua:
You’re getting off topic! This is not the place for political arguments of this sort.
Would “political chemist” be relevant to topics such as carbon capture to mitigate climate change? Military weapons such as more lethal nerve gas? How about GMO seeds, or pesticides? The fact that some parts of a field may not have direct political implications, doesn’t refute that there may be other parts of a field with highly controversial implications for the research there.
Somebody said:
“it’s
[1] much more reliably profitable
[2] and a lot less work to get a job at SpaceX or tesla
than to work in academia and hope you write a book that goes viral. ”
No doubt [1] is true, which is why no one at SpaceX (or most other companies) needs to write books or promote causes to make a living. I’ve never seen the title “Introduction to Cell Biology” on the top seller list, but it doesn’t get writen for free, and at the very least more media exposure can’t hurt in generating book contracts.
As for [2] I’m surprised you’re making that claim. A common claim about both companies is that they run people into the ground and burn them out. Meanwhile, over at the faculty club, the lifestyle bennies are incomparable. If the work in academia was anything like the work at SpaceX, the competition for academic jobs would be much weaker.
Andrew,
AFAIK, Hansen was not an “earth scientist”. His background and research was in planetary physics. While I’m sure he can follow talks on mantle dynamics or the relationship of fault surface asperities to the periodicity of fault slip, those things are very far from his expertise.
I agree different people do things that are within their skillset but that doesn’t prevent them from oportunistically using every advantage. The fact that McKibben or Hansen didn’t get rich from writing books hardly prevents them from using those activities to present views that foster a positive return.
Many chemists, environmental chemists and geochemists work for Green.Org. We’ve heard many times about people who’s views are influenced by working in a resource extraction industries. It hardly seems mistaken to apply the same claim to people who work for, are funded by, or are members of, political or environmental groups.
That’s because academia is a ponzi scheme. If you get the faculty position at all, it’s easy living, but almost nobody gets it. Hours might be long at SpaceX, but they PAY you and they have to treat you with a minimum of respect because you could get another job. In grad school you work the long hours and then cook your own instant ramen in your overpopulated roach motel, and if your advisor yells at you for no reason, you can’t reasonably switch because they can just leave a black mark on your record. Even if your advisor commits sex crimes against you and the whole university believes you, they literally can’t be fired. I’ve seen this time and time again, person in an applied math field switching from academia to a purportedly “stressful” industry job and wishing they had done it years ago.
>You see it a little in zoology some endangered species and the like, where there is a motivation to overclassify (splitter versus lumper) because in general different species are covered politically and different subspecies are not.
There seems to be a misunderstanding among both some conservationists and opponents of conservation that endangered species protection depends critically on taxonomic rank. Under the US Endangered Species Act, protection for vertebrates can be extended to species, subspecies or even population segments (i.e. particular geographic populations). A vertebrate animal does not need its own binomial to receive protection; the act protects a wider range of things than just species.
For example, the American Crocodile population in Florida was long thought to be doomed and not subspecifically distinct from American Crocodiles elsewhere. But the fact that there were, say, thriving populations of American Crocodiles in Colombia would not be a bar to extending protection to the endangered population of American Crocodiles in Florida. ( As a conservationist, I’m happy to report that American Crocodiles have bounced back, and can again be readily seen in both the Miami area and Key West; see here, for example: https//whyevolutionistrue dot com /2024/12/02/readers-wildlife-photos-2229/. I’m not sure how spam is defined by Andrew, so you’ll have to replace the ” dot ” in the previous link with a “.” to see the crocodile pictures.)
It is true that plants and invertebrates are not granted wider latitude for protection. Also, while sympathetic with Anonymous’s (on December 13, 2024 6:51 PM at 6:51 pm) concerns on the recent fad or oversplitting of species, the conventional aspects of systematics are the names used and the rank of the taxa, not the evolutionary history which the system of names is intended to reflect. The latter is a real thing, to be estimated from data, and not a matter of subjective convention.
Thanks. That sort of explains some of what I’ve seen, where I wondered how a subspecies could be protected. I do think probably naming things helps with public discussion and advocacy though. Look at the whole red wolf thing…and the efforts to stop them from miscegenating with coyotes…which they are almost identical to. Or even the wolf thing. (Since functionally, dogs and wolves and coyotes still interbreed readily and even often and at one time were named the same species.) This is not to say I don’t find wolves wonderful…hearing that primal howl in far north Wisconsin for instance. Although I do wonder if the red wolf thing is pushing a rope a bit, especially when we have lookalike coyotes in the same range now. (Yeah people say their pack stucture and howl is different, but they look the same.)
On the clades, I get the appeal that it is more functional. But it’s still something where I’m not sure each clade deserves a name (other than alphanumeric weird ones).
Also, I see a LOT of papers and Wikipedia articles where people use mitochondrial DNA clades as separations. And that’s pretty sketchy (since it just shows matrilineal differentiation and animals may have diverging female lines and mixing male ones…since males often spread much more. And more importantly since the expressed genome, what we see and about 99% of how the animal function, comes from chromosomes.
Also there is the issue that even the branching clade tree view is not perfect. Look at the braided tree of human evolution for instance.
Hybrids are not protected, which is why red wolves being swamped by interbreeding with the much more numerous coyotes is an issue under the ESA. Similarly, people worried about the Florida Panther when some South American mountain lions were released in south Florida.
The number of clades vastly exceeds our ability to usefully give them names, so no one wants to give a name (nor even weird alphanumeric ones) to every clade– that’s why so much of the naming side of systematics is conventional. With, say, 3,000,000 species of animals, the number of clades to be named is astronomical. (The calculation of the number of clades can be looked up, or worked out as an exercise– it’s not too hard!)
For example, that sliders (turtles) of the genus Trachemys and cooters (other turtles) of the genus Pseudemys form a clade together is universally acknowledged, because the evidence that that is indeed the historical course of evolution in these turtles is very strong. But whether we want to create a name for Trachemys+Pseudemys is a matter of convention– at the moment, the consensus is to not give this clade a name.
I agree completely that describing species based on mtDNA alone is ludicrous. Despite the popularity in some circles of doing so, I have heard the practice mocked at national meetings, and I believe it is on the wane.
Reticulation of lineages is an important evolutionary phenomenon, although less important in animals, and more important within biological species and actively speciating species groups. In humans, the reticulation is within undoubted members of the same biological species, or with borderline cases of geographical isolates with partial reproductive isolation following an extended period of geographical isolation (anaotomically modern humans and Neanderthaloids).
G in the name for the preceding comment is a typo.
And the preceding comment with a G isn’t there! Maybe it will show up later.
Glad to hear that about the mito DNA. That was something that bothered me about 15 years ago when I got into (very) amateur zoology. But I sort of live in the past (string theory always gave me some pause, but now it’s actually become passe, not hyped).
I think the situation of the Florida cougars is a little different than red wolve. Voters probably just want a functioning population of these magnificent top predators, not racial purity. But with the red wolves is more on point. A red wolf sounds way different than a coyote (despite them being almost literally kissing cousins) and voters would not feel the same about just having coyotes on hand in Alligator River:
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/alligator-river
Greg:
Been a while since I looked into turtles, but you do have a family and subfamilies, right? You want a sub-sub family? ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emydidae
The standard taxonomic hierarchy for animals includes phyla, classes, orders, families, tribes, genera and species. Each of these can have super- and sub-, and some allow infra- below sub-. But there’s still way too many clades for each to have a name. Trachemys and Pseudemys have at times been lumped in the single genus Pseudemys; they’ve also been lumped with painted turtles in the genus Chrysemy. But either option that still leaves a bunch of unnamed clades.
Yeah, you can look at the taxonomy sections of articles and see the history of different ideas (including some lumping and splitting). I tend to be kind of skeptical of some of the revisionist stuff. Think it is too quickly accepted. But of course, you also don’t want to ignore real new information.
Here’s a paper, based on mitochondria, arguing for elevating a subspecies to species:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0014-3820.2003.tb00220.x
“We analyzed variation in the rapidly evolving mitochondrial control region (CR) in 241 turtles from 117 localities across this range to examine whether the painted turtle represents a continentally distributed species based on molecular analysis. We found strong support for the novel hypothesis that C. p. dorsalis is the sister group to all remaining Chrysemys…”
It’s been 20 years since they put this out and the bunfight is still not really resolved. (I think, donno really.) Would think there would have been chromosomal DNA to follow up (from one side or the other). And really, more meaningful, some resampling to prove or disprove that the “different species” intergrade readily at the border of the species (formerly subspecies border). Or…don’t.
I have no clue what the truth is, but if I had to bet, I’d say there’s a pretty normal intergradation at the boundaries. And the academic motivation to “discover a new species” drove this classification change.
But, I’m just an Internet reader/commenter. But tying it back to the blog, we all a readers have to be Bayesians about experts. Especially on more subjective topics or if experts disagree. I mean I trust the math types to have checked Andrew Wiles FLT. But different expert’ turtle classification squables? Meh.
I feel like we are taught as researchers by our institutions to place as much emphasis on “research translation” as possible. In most cases I think this manifests as blatantly hyperbolic language when it comes to study implications. Were I off by a factor of 10 in a paper, I would probably be getting pressured by the university’s media team to spin it as not affecting the results so that the negative publicity could be sidestepped.
In a way, I’m not surprised by the authors’ response (they at least agreed to a correction) but it’s still disappointing as they must have responded this way out of sheer embarrassment.
On a totally serious note:
1. are the folks at Toxic-Free Future concerned about plastic kitchenware of other colors (dark gray? blue? red? orange?)?
2. are the folks at Toxic-Free Future concerned about the wellbeing of Asian children? [note this statement: “it appears the study’s hypothesis is correct, that black plastic recycled out of electronic devices, mostly in Asia, is getting back into the American supply chain for household kitchen items, including spatulas.”]
I think when it comes to 1) it’s easier to use a wider variety of sources in black. In order to make something bright red, you are limited in what kind of sources you can use. Cases of electronic products are often black, grey, or other dark colors, so quite possibly the electronic items wind up in the black stream more than other streams.
P.s. Adam ragusea in a video 3 weeks ago made this point
https://youtu.be/58HUM40gDPU?si=PGK6kWoztP3fpYCo
I have been wondering who was first to market with this point. Adam apparently sent the authors a note.
Andrew, why do you say
“The individual recommendation—throw away your black plastic spatula—might not change”?
I mean the concentration of these materials is less than 1/10 of a potentially dangerous concentration. So I think the individual recommendation has to change into “keep your black plastic spatula, there is nothing to worry about”
Huan:
I said “might not change.” The appropriate recommendation depends on the expected risk, not based on whether the median concentration in some study happens to be at least 80% of some regulatory level. You can make the recommendation to throw away the spatula just based on general understanding of the bad things that are in that plastic.
Also, I don’t even have a black plastic spatula! I use a wooden spoon, metal spatula, or silicone spatula.
The article now bears a second correction lowering the exposure estimates. The article, as published, claimed the predicted exposure was too close to the EPA reference dose for comfort. The reference dose was misreported as 10X too low, as covered already in this forum. The actual exposure was reported at least 4X too high. Net result is that rather than being equal, the updated analysis places the likely exposure as 53X lower than the reference dose.
The reanalysis is flawed and in a letter to the editor I argue the exposure is at least 28,000 times less due to the errors made in both math and method.
It gets even worse since in their rebuttal to my letter to the editor they disclose they looked only at the handles of kitchen items. This is important since transfer by simple handing is, using the references they used to estimate exposure, unlikely. While claiming transfer to food, they never examined the part of the spatulas that touch food. A steel spatula with a plastic handle would yield the same exposure based on the flawed methodology yet be incapable of transferring flame retardants to food. The exposure through food intake is zero.
My calls for the paper’s retraction did not succeed. In spite of the mistakes, the authors still stand behind the conclusions. The journal editors did not agree being off by, at a minimum, a factor of 53 in the measurement of exposure warranted a retraction. I stand behind my analysis that the correctly calculated exposure is thousands of times less. My peer reviewed letter, with nothing to indicate my logic is flawed, was insufficient to get the original work retracted or substantially modified.
Spatulas will continue to reach an untimely and unwarranted end. I suggest changing the name of this thread to “How a simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils”: Does it matter when an estimate is off by a factor of at least 28,000?