1. Full citation.
Vogel, David. The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States. Princeton [N.J.: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.
2. Where did/does the author work, what else has s/he written about, and what are her/his credentials?
David Vogel is professor at the Haas School of Business and in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility.
3. What are the topics of the text?
Food safety, regulations, FDA, carcinogens, and the role of how the public perception of risks can affect policy
4. What is the main argument of the text?
Differences in transatlantic standards for assessing the risks of carcinogens specifically had important policy impacts with regards to food safety and agriculture.
5. Describe at least three ways that the argument is supported.
The book uses the examples of DES, cyclamates, several pesticides, beef hormones, and the plant-growth regulator Alar to illustrate this point.
6. What three quotes capture the message of the text?
American policies toward carcinogens primarily reflected public perceptions: "Americans fear cancer more than any other disease." A Gallup poll taken during the mid-1970s found that the public overwhelmingly selected cancer "as the worst thing that can happen to you." (p 47)
The former associate director of the American National Cancer Institute observed, "British work on carcinogenesis seems much more conservative than ours in that they seem to be much more reluctant than American researchers to assert cause-effect relationships." (p 47)
The dramatic nature of the dangers identified by the NRDC and extensively publicized in the media created an effective "policy trigger." Virtually overnight, the risks of consuming apples treated with a chemical product that had been in use for more than two decades become both credible and politically unacceptable. (p 53)
7. What three questions about environmental risk and precaution does this article leave you with?
How big of an impact does hype from the media play and what measures are there to keep it in check?
At one point the text reads that American beef companies were dependent on beef hormones for their production (p 59). What would happen if a risk were to become too significant when already 90% of the cattle had been receiving the hormone?
How are carcinogens permitted to be used as medicine, as was the case with cyclamate-saccharin?
8. What three points, details or references from the text did you follow up on to advance your perspective on environmental risk and precaution? (Provide citations, with a brief explanation of what you learned. One of these should be fully annotated, as your second required reading for each week.)
I looked up “The Great Apple Scare of 1989”. "Alar: The Great Apple Scare." Heartlander Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013. : From this I learned about how scares and public campaigns can be really detrimental to a product that is actually relatively safe.
I looked up if there have been any changes to the Delaney Amendment since 1958. "Agripedia | Delaney Clause." Agripedia | Delaney Clause. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013. : I learned that The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) which was signed into law August 3, 1996 revised the Delaney Clause so that it no longer affects pesticides.
I looked up the National Cancer Institute’s Animal Testing Program and it led me to look up animal testing in general. "Animal Testing." Global Action Network: : Articles on Animal Research: : Science or Fiction? N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013. : This article told me that contrary to popular belief, many studies published in the scientific literature comparing drug side effects in humans and animals have found animal tests to be less predictive than tossing a coin. One review of human-animal correlation in drugs that had been withdrawn because of adverse reactions found that animal tests predicted the human side effects only six out of 114 times.
Vogel, David. The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States. Princeton [N.J.: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.
2. Where did/does the author work, what else has s/he written about, and what are her/his credentials?
David Vogel is professor at the Haas School of Business and in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility.
3. What are the topics of the text?
Food safety, regulations, FDA, carcinogens, and the role of how the public perception of risks can affect policy
4. What is the main argument of the text?
Differences in transatlantic standards for assessing the risks of carcinogens specifically had important policy impacts with regards to food safety and agriculture.
5. Describe at least three ways that the argument is supported.
The book uses the examples of DES, cyclamates, several pesticides, beef hormones, and the plant-growth regulator Alar to illustrate this point.
6. What three quotes capture the message of the text?
7. What three questions about environmental risk and precaution does this article leave you with?
8. What three points, details or references from the text did you follow up on to advance your perspective on environmental risk and precaution? (Provide citations, with a brief explanation of what you learned. One of these should be fully annotated, as your second required reading for each week.)