[Fwd: Be wary. the PP lurks....]

[maury <maury@webtexas.com>]

Robert Godfrey posted the link to this, but please be assured that it

is well worth the read. I had posted the "whole thing" but lyris

auto-rejected it because it is too long. So here are some teasers .... 

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA592.htm

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Be wary. the PP lurks....

Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 12:56:12 -0500

From: maury <maury@webtexas.com>



I hope you will forgive the length and revel in the delight of this

explication of the PP - precautionary principle. As much of Europe

continues to stagnate from increasing regulation and other

circumscriptions, the EU (European Union) is even considering an

embodiment of the PP in their new constitution. The United States is not

oblivious to the siren call of this trend. Pressures mount to expand the

applications of PP in the US -- be careful: PP=PPP!

Cheers,

Maury&Dog

==================

 16 June 2004  More sorry than safe  by Brendan O'Neill



"... Now he watches as his 'good profession' threatens to be

undermined by what he says is an 'unscientific demand' to put

precaution first."



"... indeed, almost all of the great scientific advancements of the

past 200 years have been a process of 'learning as we went along'.

'Consider blood transfusions', he says. 'When we started doing them,

we knew about some blood groups but there were others we didn't know

 about. We only came to know ..."



"... radiotherapy or the various applications of x-rays if Marie Curie

had been under pressure to comply with the precautionary principle',

he says. In the early twentieth century, Polish-born physicist and

chemist Curie devoted her working life to the study of radium, paving

the way for nuclear physics and the treatment of cancer. It cost her

her life - she died from leukaemia in 1934, almost blind, her fingers

burned by radium. 'Curie's work caused her "irreversible harm"', says

Berry. 'The precautionary principle would not have permitted her to

take such risks, and the world would have been a worse place for it.'



"... 'Safety is a description of an approach, rather than an absolute

state', he says."



"... DDT - ... another example of how the 'application of precaution'

can cause death and disease. In some third world countries where

malaria had been all but eradicated over the past 20 years, there have

been epidemics of the disease since DDT was restricted. Currently

malaria is on the rise in all the tropical regions of the planet; in

2000, it killed more than one million and made 300million seriously ill.

'Campaigners claimed that DDT was bad for the environment; they said

that it caused harm to American birds of prey. I'm sorry, but why

should people in the third world at risk from malaria care about

American birds of prey?"



"... train crash of October 2000, which killed four passengers and

injured 30, had in fact exposed themselves to an increased risk of

injury or death. 'Road accidents kill more people than railway

accidents do', he says. 'Yet because there is a perception that rail

travel is unacceptably risky, some people opt to go by car instead.

But the death rate on the road per billion person miles travelled

is about 12 times that of the railways.'"



"... in Australia and New Zealand, and a case-controlled study in

Britain in the 1990s, showed that reversing this policy and putting

babies to sleep on their backs instead reduced the death rate from

SIDS. In the UK, it fell from about 1,300 to 1,400 a year to about

300 to 400, he says. 'With the best intentions the precautionary

measure of putting babies on their sides or fronts caused misery; a

great many precious baby lives were lost because of what seemed like

a reasonable precaution. It was one of those things that just

happened to be wrong. This shows that we need data - ..."



"... since been discovered that the [cholera] epidemic was, in part,

a result of the Peruvian authorities' decision to stop chlorinating

drinking water supplies - and that one reason they stopped doing

this was because reports issued by the American Environmental

Protection Agency had claimed there was a link between drinking

chlorinated water and an increased risk of cancer ..."



"... But we should not be in a position to restrict the use

of GM [geneticlly modified crops] in the third world. As an African

said recently, "You go ahead and ban GM crops, but can we eat first?"'

Berry says the restriction of the use of potentially life-saving

technologies in the third world is 'a kind of environmental

imperialism - if something is perceived to be bad for some American

bird, then no one else in the world can use it either. That is

absurd; we really cannot go on like this.'"

_________

And as Clark Carrington suggested; how should fire and the wheel have

been dealt with ....

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