This story is part of CBC Health’s Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.
Headlines warning people to throw out their black plastic kitchen utensils live on, as do social media posts warning of “secret toxins” in your kitchen.
Less prominent? A correction to the peer-reviewed study those headlines were based on.
In October, the journal Chemosphere published a study by researchers in the U.S. and Netherlands that found brominated fire retardants (BFR) in black plastic household products sold in the U.S., including kitchen items.
But there was a math error when the study’s authors calculated the risk — and it was off by an order of magnitude.
The authors said they regret the error, but it “does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” as it was part of an example used to compare exposure levels to add context, not a core finding.
“The key thing our study does is provide evidence that when toxic flame retardants are used in electronics, they can make their way into household products where they are not needed or expected,” said Megan Liu of Seattle environmental group Toxic-Free Future, who co-wrote the study.
The flame retardants are typically used in black plastic, such as television casings, and when those plastics are recycled the chemicals can make their way into products that touch food.
While media coverage of the study often focused on what individuals could do, like ditch black plastic spatulas, Liu said the ultimate solution is more regulation.
Though regrettable, errors happen, including in studies that have been peer-reviewed. They can range from a typo or miscalculation that gets a correction, to mistakes so large the paper is retracted, to rare but full-blown fraud. The promise of the scientific process is that by exposing work to the scrutiny of others, any problems will be corrected over time.
The trouble is, it does take time — and the resulting fixes rarely get the public attention of the original errors, say journal editors.
Tim Caulfield, author of The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters, and a professor at the faculty of law and school of public health at the University of Alberta, studies the twisting of facts and information.
“It was interesting, exciting, it was scary and it got over-promoted,” Caulfield said of the black plastic study. “The correction happens and the problem is, there’s almost always less uptake of the correction and the original story lives on, right? It becomes a zombie fact that just won’t die.”
Fraud allowed to fester
There may be no bigger shadow cast by a retracted paper than Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent and discredited 1998 study on what he claimed was a link between the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
The study was finally retracted by the Lancet journal in 2010, after subsequent studies and an investigation by regulators that found Wakefield “irresponsible and dishonest.”
But that was 12 years after publication, allowing the misinformation to take hold in popular culture.
An elite teen squad of fact checkers with the help of media literacy organizations are learning to suss out scams and fake information on TikTok, making videos to teach other teens about misinformation online.
“It took far too long to get retracted,” Caulfield said. “Retractions, unless they’re quickly done and clearly communicated can take on a political spin such that the retraction itself becomes a badge of honour.”
Acting fast to retract is important to maintain public trust and to make sure that the scientific literature is as pollution-free as possible, he said.
Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks errors in journals, who teaches medical journalism at New York University, said because Wakefield’s study took so long to be retracted, “the lie is allowed to fester and allowed to inform public thinking. We’re seeing that now, of course, with RFK Jr.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who may be health secretary in president-elect Donald Trump’s administration, questions, for example, if vaccines have caused more harm than good.
“Wakefield’s paper might be the most consequential fraud, outright fraudulent paper, ever published,” said Dr. Steven Shafer, an anesthesiologist at Stanford University and clinical pharmacologist who served as editor-in-chief at the medical journal Anesthesia and Analgesia.
Shafer and other physicians see continued injury and fallout from Wakefield’s retraction, including measles vaccination rates that plummeted after the publication.
The Current24:15Tim Caulfield on finding truth amid the information chaos
How do you figure out what’s true, in a time when misinformation is rampant? Timothy Caulfield looks at how our information systems became so chaotic in his new book The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters.
Admitting honest mistakes
To be clear, there’s no allegations of fraud in the black plastics study, and it is only corrected, not retracted.
When honest mistakes do happen, Oransky said science should normalize owning up to legitimate errors and champion the behaviour. “Humility is a pretty powerful tool.”
Shafer agrees.
“Honest scientists admit mistakes, because accurate reporting by scientists, and by peer-reviewed journals that publish science, is the sine qua non of science,” meaning it is indispensable to the field.
Both Oransky and Caulfield pointed to the importance of media literacy, including critical thinking skills, to counter the spread of misinformation.
Their suggestions include:
-
Remember science is complicated with few ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers.
-
An immediate recommendation, like to start or stop doing X based on a single study, is rarely evidence-based.
-
Keep in mind how scientists are under pressure to produce research quickly that’s immediately relevant, which drives science hype.
-
Since no study is perfect, the most trustworthy findings are supported by multiple studies that stand up to scrutiny over time.
“The more evidence that a news article or a TikTok video or a government pronouncement includes, the more I trust it, especially if it includes some nuance and some evidence of ‘here’s what we don’t know,'” Oransky said.
Despite the challenges, Oransky said he still believes the scientific method is the best way to understand the world better and to try to get closer to whatever the truth is.
“I just think we have to look long and hard at that process and make it better.”
