The report is here (and in French): https://www.anses.fr/fr/system/files/CONSO2017SA0019Ra.pdf … To be clear, my French is thoroughly mediocre and I have only read part of the report
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As usual,
@guardian has probably the best take - yes, there were traces of ~potentially~ harmful chemicals found in nappies What this means is far more complexpic.twitter.com/IAK1JSsSWB
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The thing is, nappies are not food. They are not breathed in, ingested, or in other ways exposed directly to babies' internals So what's the issue with pollutants? Nappies do, of course, get polluted with waste themselves
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Well, here's where it gets interesting. The French agency Anses realized that pollutants could be dissolved in urine. These could then, potentially, remain on babies' skin and cause harm
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And, as the report notes, the majority of French parents use disposable nappies for their babies
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So, what did they find? If you pour urine-like substances onto nappies, the resultant liquid contains traces of various pollutants. Sometimes
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When I say traces, I mean in the region of "unable to detect" to "nanograms per kilogram" In other words, not a lot!pic.twitter.com/PjmNLbAsWI
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Glyphosate, which has been singled out by every news publication on this topic, was actually only detected in TINY amounts and not in most nappiespic.twitter.com/wHVMqJyYTl
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The reason for many of these pollutants is that nappies are made from cellulose, which comes from plants, which may have been grown in polluted areas themselves Most of the others were perfume componentspic.twitter.com/8MecMWk63R
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The report then estimates, with some very complex modelling, how much of these pollutants babies might be exposed to over the course of ~4,000 nappies used in their lifetimes
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Without going into too much detail, the margins of error for these estimates are VERY HIGH. It's entirely possible that babies absorb far less (or far more) than the estimates
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They then compare the worst-case scenario estimates - the highest end of their wide confidence interval - with reference doses for these pollutants Reference dose = dose at which toxicity is likely/possible for a specific chemical
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And guess what? GLYPHOSATE WAS SAFE. IT WASN'T ONE OF THE PROBLEMATIC POLLUTANTS (green = lower maximum estimated exposure than reference dose over lifetime)pic.twitter.com/3OaRwnXX5B
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There were, however, plenty of pollutants that were higher - many of them only by tiny amounts - than the reference doses That's ~potentially~ an issue
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The report then goes on to recommend that the substances be removed from nappies This is a fair recommendation, because although there's no evidence that they are harmful in these doses for this exposure, babies are very vulnerable and we want to be carefulpic.twitter.com/LSYZA5MGsc
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Wow, that thread went on for far longer than I was expecting. Take-homes: 1. These exposures probably aren't harmful 2. They are in ~tiny~ doses, even across 4,000+ nappies 3. BUT we are careful where infants are concerned 4. This doesn't mean you should worry
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All that being said, it's worth noting how truly absurd it is that a report that found that glyphosate WASN'T AN ISSUE is being reported on as an indication that we should be scared of nappies because glyphosate
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