By Dr Farsalinos, E-cigarette Blog
The formaldehyde study scandal conducted by researchers from Portland university is progressing, with the authors unwilling to admit their methodological and presentation mistakes, while they continue their effort to misinform the public and consider our case for retraction as an attempt to help the industry or to get money from the industry. First of all, the only one who got money was the Portland University. They created a problem and they were awarded millions to “solve” it. Let me clarify in brief that the retraction was based on:
1. Assessing the risk of developing cancer from exposure to a chemical which they did NOT find in the study. All the analysis was based on formaldehyde exposure, while they only found formaldehyde hemiacetals. Formaldehyde hemiacetals are not classified as carcinogenic or toxic, thus their whole analysis is invalid.
2. They intentionally manipulated statistics by displaying in the same graph mean ± standard deviation values for formaldehyde in tobacco cigarettes and mean ± standard error of mean for formaldehyde hemiacetals in e-cigarettes. They intentionally did this in order to hide the huge variability in their measurements (standard error of mean is much lower than standard deviation).
3. They continue to create confusion and misinform the public by discussing about formaldehyde exposure, while (I repeat) they DID NOT find any formaldehyde.
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