The 5 Most Ridiculously Over-Hyped Health Scares of All Time
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#3.
The Cranberry Scare of 1959
When it comes to breaking bad news to people, timing is everything. For instance, if at all possible, you'd prefer that your girlfriend not tell you she's leaving while she's banging your best friend. In a similar vein, it may have not been the best timing ever when on November 9, 1959, just 15 days before Thanksgiving, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Arthur Fleming announced that a shipment of cranberries from Oregon was found to be contaminated with aminotriazole, a weed killer that had been shown to cause thyroid cancer in rats.
In a matter of days, grocery stores across the country were pulling products containing cranberries from their shelves. Better safe than sorry, right? Well, there was something Fleming failed to mention. For a human to match the cancer causing aminotriazole dosage fed to the lab rats, they would have to consume 15,000 pounds of berries. Daily. For years. As these photos of a plate of cranberry sauce before and after a recent Thanksgiving celebration show, Americans don't eat nearly that amount.
Officials familiar with these minor details grew increasingly wary of the damage that Fleming's comments may have on the cranberry industry and began to distance themselves from the scare. After Presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy both ate cranberries at a campaign stop in Wisconsin, the nation slowly came to their collective senses. By Thanksgiving, cranberries were back on grocery store shelves and back to being universally ignored on Thanksgiving dinner tables nationwide. In 1959, cranberries killed fewer people than ...
... were killed flying in a plane with Buddy Holly. |
As if making the announcement just weeks ahead of the one day of the year when some people do actually eat cranberries wasn't bad enough, Fleming leaned a little too heavily on the "Holy shit we're all going to die!" technique when it came to getting information to the public. Even though tests of cranberries from several other states showed no signs of contamination, when asked how a housewife could be sure the berries she buys are safe, Fleming replied "To be on the safe side, she doesn't buy. Also, he might as well have gone on to say, 'If you've eaten any cranberries in the last 24 hours, make your peace with the Lord.'
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"Who gives a f**k about the damn birds?"
I DO!!!! They're in my username, dagnabit!
Put otherwise, it was a good article.
There's the SL-1 reactor in Idaho, 1961. All 3 of the crew died there. (One of which had a control rod shoved through him.) It's biggest asset is probably why it's so unknown: it's remote location.
3 mile island didn't cause any deaths but if the fuel had melted though the containment vessel and into the ground it would have eventually reached the water table and caused a steam explosion. And that would have caused a radioactive cloud and massive contamination.
Evacuating people was not an overreaction. All that may not have happened, but it could have.
"Because it was kind of effective in fighting malaria. When spraying of DDT stopped in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), malaria cases rose from 17 in 1963 to 2.5 goddamn million in 1969, an increase of approximately a bajillion fofillion percent. And to this day, the mosquito remains the deadliest killer Mother Nature has to offer, with a confirmed 2 million kills per year."
Ok tree huggers, what exactly about this statement is a lie? How do we know mosquitos here are unaffected by DDT? They stopped using it! TWO million is not a small number of HUMANS... And I doubt they have Bald eagles in Sri Lanka and if they did, aren't human lives more important? I wish all tree huggers would go live in Sri Lanka armed with nothing more than a net.
TMI ACCIDENT WAS INTENTIONALY CAUSED BY AN EX-US NAVY NUKE SUB OPERATOR WHO DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A COLLEGE DEGREE...HE SAW THE CHINA SYNDROME MOVIE AND WAS TRYING TO RE-CREATE IT BY REMOVING ALL THE WATER FROM THE CORE...WANTED TO SEE IT MELT DOWN INTO THE EARTH....AND IT DID...JUST DIDN'T MAKE IT THROUGH THE FLOOR COMPLETELY AND PEOPLE NOTICED IT AND PUT WATER BACK ON THE CORE....CAUSING BIG STEAM & HYDROGEN BUBBLE...WHICH THEY VENTED INTO THE AIR OVER YORK HAVEN...BUT ANYWAY....JUST LIKE 90% OF ALL ARSONS ARE CAUSED BY FIREFIGHTERS...TMI ACCIDENT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT...IT WAS DONE ON PURPOSE BY A NUTCAKE WHO ALTERED THE LIGHT ON THE VALVE DISPLAY
the problem with DDT is that it effects the generation after, the eggs were cracking for pecivorous species such as the American Bald Eagle and lowering the birth rates. Yes, let's let the symbol of American life go extinct. Also the US still sells DDT to foreign countries and it pretty much doesn't work for most mosquitoes anymore anyways.
Why all the profanity? I enjoyed reading the story - but the profanity really puts me off. This language has become every-day for most people, including children. I say - JUST SAY NO to profanity.
I'm surprised that there's nothing about Alar here.
You're right, don't believe everything you read...including all of this article.
the percent increase for the malaria is %14705782.35
HIPPIES ARE DESTROYING THE WORLD
Trains are a good one, when they were first introduced people were scared to ride them as it was believed that going faster than 30 mph could squash your internal organs into nothingness.
Putting DDT on this list is absurd. It wasn't so much banned for its carcinogenic effects as much as for its absolutely devastating ecological impact. And like it or not, the state of the environment DOES affect the state of humanity eventually.
But don't worry, the United States still to this day manufactures and sells DDT to third-world countries (you know, the ones that don't care about human rights, much less human responsibility to the environment).
DDT is no longer useful for preventing malaria; most mosquitos are now resistant to it. Still, the hippies should shut up.
To all the nuclear power proponents: It really isn't nearly as cheap as you make it out to be. It's just cleaner, which in my view, already recommends it enough.
Heh. Haven't heard about DDT since The Machine used it to try and kill Willy in the Free Willy Cartoon. GOOD times...
The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island is what caused all nuclear power plant building to come to a screeching halt. Thereafter we have visions of glowing green whenever we we hear the word "nuclear" much less use it. This is still true dispite the many years of safe use by electrical utilities (and military aboard ships and subs.)
Oh yeah, those of that will bring up Chernobyl should note that it envolved a screwball, obsolete reactor design that we don't use and there are modern pebble bed reactor designs that would be as safe as running a microwave.
And those environmentalist got the DDT banned once it had removed the malaria from their continents. Once they were safe from it, save the f*****g birds!, who cares of the africans and asians that still die in millions because of no DDT?
"No, when you absolutely, positively must kill every m**********r in the room, crocidolite or amosite is what you need."
Substitutes not accepted. That made me laugh a lot.
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Some countries still use DDT. THAT'S how they know mosquitos build up immunity to it. That's also how they're able to test for the dozens and dozens of other fucked up problems it's use causes. I swear some of you believe it's some f*****g miracle product. It's a fucked up chemical that does a lot of damage. So what if it saves people from Malaria? It kills them in other ways. And yes it does kill a lot of animals and causes severe environmental damage as well. Plus it's not like they don't have other chemicals that are JUST as effective and don't have all the band side effects.