9 Times The Media Tried To Scare Us With Bad Science
3. Pretty Much Anything The Daily Mail Says About Cancer
If you believe the Daily Mail, you're probably about to drop dead of multiple cancers at any moment. But it's generally not a good idea to believe the Daily Mail about anything, so you're probably fine.
The DM is infamous for its unwavering dedication to scaring the living daylights out of the nation before breakfast, and it would seem that those honourable journalists at the Daily Mail have discovered that the best way to do this is to throw the C word about.
You can, in fact, find a number of comprehensive lists online that outline everything the Daily Mail has said will give you cancer. At last count, the list was at around 136, but that number is always going up. The list of horrors includes crayons, deodorant, dieting, being a man, being a woman, cheese, age, bras, blowjobs, mouthwash, spots, tea, menstruation, peanut butter and many many more.
The main conclusion that we can draw from this list is that the leading cause of cancer is "living until something kills you".
Many of these supposedly cancerous claims are, again, drawn from scientific research papers and taken wildly out of context. For example, a recent claim that swimming in chlorinated pools can give you bladder cancer was taken from a paper entitled “Socioeconomic status and exposure to disinfection by-products in drinking water in Spain”.
The paper was not designed to look at the effect of swimming pools at all. One tiny piece of information within the paper was taken out of context and extrapolated by the DM for their story.
As part of a large questionnaire, participants in the study were asked to identify as either a "swimmer" or a non-swimmer". The criteria for being classed as a swimmer was that they had swam in a pool at least once during that last year. Not exactly reliable.
Oh, and, none of the 1271 participants in the study actually developed bladder cancer.