Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

This article does a terrible job of explaining the specific threat. A few paragraphs in, buried, is this:

> ... It took until last year for mattresses and furniture containing the highly toxic retardant deca-BDE to be banned, under European law, from sale. ...

If that's the threat, then Wikipedia has a long way to catch up:

> In 2004, ATSDR wrote "Nothing definite is known about the health effects of PBDEs in people. Practically all of the available information is from studies of laboratory animals. Animal studies indicate that commercial decaBDE mixtures are generally much less toxic than the products containing lower brominated PBDEs. Because of its very different toxicity, decaBDE is expected to have relatively little effect on the health of humans."[5] Based on animal studies, the possible health effects of decaBDE in humans involve the liver, thyroid, reproductive/developmental effects, and neurological effects.[25]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decabromodiphenyl_ether

Take a look at the Acknowledgement in that report, i.e the flame retardant industry funded it. There are numerous studies into the ill effects of DecaBDE and the fact it's been banned suggest these are well-founded. The flame retardant industry always hides behind their argument that you can't say that cancer was caused by that chemical. Even if that was true, the precautionary principle suggests not using them, especially when there is no evidence they improve fire safety.

"The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency gratefully acknowledges the efforts of the Illinois Public Interest Research Group and the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum to provide the Agency with important information regarding the polybrominated diphenyl ethers, especially decabromodiphenyl ether, in meetings on July 25, 2005 and September 8, 2005, respectively, and through personal contacts. The information provided is greatly appreciated."

I mean, look at how they framed the article...that this is a scandal because of Brexit...because Brexit is designed to hide corruption.

Even though the wheels started turning on all of this a few years ago. Even though the EU themselves only banned things in the last year.

Rather than jumping into the actual story, they used it to push an entirely unrelated political narrative. Worse still, a lot of folks are going to see those first two paragraphs and not read the rest of the article.

There is probably some truth though that government is to a degree hoping that Brexit will sort out the mess that is the UK's furniture regulations, i.e. that the officials concerned can cover their backs by allowing industry to replace the regs with codes of practice that will they hope keep flame retardant levels up - something that would have been harder to do in the EU.

I could see that being the case, but that's not a conjecture that I would lead my story with.

That kind of journalism is really divisive and irresponsible, IMO.

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