In articles where such emotional topics, e.g. the health of your baby, are discussed, I think it would be especially important to improve the reporting of statistics. Here, a scary sounding odds ratio is mentioned (children of mothers with high urine values of the plastic softeners had three times the odds to develop ADHD). Because it is directed at the general public, it seems important to also report the estimated probabilities, which are likely low for both groups of mothers. I'm not saying this because I have any form of beliefs regarding the chemicals in question, which sound awful. But I do know from experience that few people are parsing odds ratios differently from probabilities, which seems important. For both of these reasons, this should be part of the job of authors/journalists.
An important consideration is the number of lives are phthalates improving or saving, something that might be challenging to quantify but shouldn’t be ignored.<p>Mobile phone use leads to thousands (US) [0] of deaths per year but there are few calls to outright ban smartphones.<p>Similarly, automobiles lead to tens of thousands of deaths per year (US) [1] and yet only minor support to ban or minimize these death machines.<p>There are countless other examples of useful objects that provide first order - easy to reason about - benefits that come with steep prices that we are willing to pay.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving" rel="nofollow">https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/" rel="nofollow">https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/</a>