Scaring Us to Death VIII

Halloween is Saturday. So the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a lefty bunch that once caught a mistake I made in a 20/20 report on organic food, now wants to scare children away from face paint.

I am grateful the American Council on Science and Health for providing this example of the Left’s destructive alarmism:

EWG's Campaign for Safe Cosmetics released the horror story today: “10 out of 10 children's face paints we tested contained low levels of lead, ranging from 0.05 to 0.65 parts per million (ppm). Experts say there is no safe level of lead exposure for children.”

Among their referenced “experts” is Dr. Philip J. Landrigan of the Children's Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who admitted, “I fully endorse the concept that lead is dangerous to the developing brains of children at any level. It is now widely accepted in the scientific community that there is no threshold level below which lead is safe.”

Of course he does.  I’ve written about Dr. Landrigan.  ASCH goes on to point out:

“Apparently, they're also condemning the White House organic garden,” says Stier. “There was over a thousand times that much lead in the soil.”

“This is so unscientific, so irresponsible, but also so typical of EWG,” says Dr. Ross. “These people are consummate marketers of their agenda, which is anti-chemical, anti-industry, and pro-government. It's like we explained in our bio-monitoring paper, detection methods are so sophisticated these days that you can detect trace amounts of pretty much anything in people's blood.  Finding a substance is not the problem, it's determining how much of the substance it takes to have a negative health effect.”

Dr. Whelan agrees: “They are taking advantage of people who do not understand the concept of dose.  It's the dose that makes the poison.”

But I bet EWG still gets its irresponsible “horror story” onto plenty of TV News programs.