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Date: 2010-04-30 12:48 am (UTC)
I am glad Jackson's getting seen to; I tend to be optimistic since if whatever it is hasn't killed him already it's probably fixable. It is amazing how many of the people I know went through horrible childhood medical traumas with no ill effects. I perhaps have a false sense of security, but right now I'm seeing this as something stressful the family will get through rather than something likely to be terminal and tragic. I mean, how many miserable medical disasters have you been through? You're still here, thank goodness. :)

As far as your other point . . . a lot of that stuff is not so statistically significant. There's a disproportionate amount of press about the things we can control, but it's a little bit like . . . it doesn't matter if you have a perfect roof or a crappy roof if a tornado hits. 8% of live births in the U.S. involve birth defects, of which about 6% are immediately reversible. That first number has been stable for a long time. The second has gone up over time. The number of birth defects attributable to environmental factors like what the mother eats or whether her neighbor used pesticides is maybe only 2%. In other words, of that 8%, 98% are due to replication errors - random chance - or genetic factors.

There's a point at which I say there is too high a cost of trying to prevent a tiny percent of an already small fraction, especially when the things one would have to stop would mean large numbers of people starving or dying of malaria or any number of other terrible things. Let alone the sanity of the mother.

I will say straight up regarding men's infertility that there's a lot of credible evidence that it's the result of a lot of soy consumption (as fetuses, as children, as adults), because soy is a pseudoestrogen. That seems to be one of the credible actual dangers. However, generally, I'm skeptical of a lot of the numbers of "increasing rates of whatever due to environmental factors of the last 50 years" because one of the reason we're seeing increasing rates of all kinds of things as adults is because in the past those people wouldn't have survived to become as adults, or we wouldn't have had the sophistication to diagnose their problems and database them. If something doesn't have a clear effect over a 10 year period or shorter, I discount it because there are too many complicating factors. I say this as someone who's studied econometric analysis, which is what a lot of these long-term studies rely on.
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