this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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That's because pretty much everything does cause cancer eventually. That's just a consequence of how cellular division works. The trick is knowing how much exposure to any given thing is needed to cause cancer, and whether you're likely to reach that threshold before you die of anything else.
Yeah, living causes cancer. The real question is, how much does something increase your risk of developing cancer. If it's less than the increase from walking around outside for a few hours on a bright day you can pretty safely ignore that. As long as you're not eating the interior of your car I doubt this poses a significant risk.
The article states its a 400% increase......
Well it says people with a high blood concentration of these chemicals have a 4x increase vs. those with a low concentration. That sounds bad but it might not be. If your odds of developing cancer in the low concentration group are 1 in a million, then your odds in the high concentration group are only 1 in 250,000 which isn't exactly great but isn't terrible either. On the other hand if your odds in the low group are 1 in 10,000, then in the high group it's now 1 in 2,500 which is pretty bad.
All that is also ignoring that the article never directly says cars are responsible, only that the chemicals are present in them, and that people with a high blood concentration of those chemicals have a higher risk. Time is also never discussed. Does it take 80 years of near constant exposure to reach "high blood concentrations", or are we talking like 5 years? The article is just too nebulous and vague. It shows some correlations, but seems to fall short of both causal links and quantifying the actual risks.
Your smart-ass little comment was about if it increases more than walking around outside. You made it without reading the article, and now you're trying to strawman your way around it by talking about what a 400% increase actually means, as if everyone in here is as dumb as you think they are. Newsflash for ya. Most arent.
You completely missed the point. 400% is meaningless without more context. If I increase my odds of winning the lottery by 400%, I'd still be a moron for wasting my money in the lottery. Percentages are constantly abused in marketing and news articles to imply things that don't really apply.
So yes, the article doesn't actually specify how much your risk increases due to being exposed to those chemicals, just saying 400% is about as informative as saying 6 or 10,000. It implies a significant risk, but doesn't support it. Without knowing how much risk there actually is it's impossible to evaluate if the benefits outweigh the risks.
Your "risk" increases 400%. Your risk of getting a specific cancer before may have only been something like 0.02%, but now it's 0.08%. That's still a 400% increase.