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Here’s the Birth of the Modern Anti-Vax Movement

by ShelliHollars Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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A New York Times video takes a look at the birth of the belief that vaccinations can cause autism in young children:

It turns on a seminal moment in anti-vaccination resistance. This was an announcement in 1998 by a British doctor who said he had found a relationship between the M.M.R. vaccine — measles, mumps, rubella — and the onset of autism.

Typically, the M.M.R. shot is given to infants at about 12 months and again at age 5 or 6. This doctor, Andrew Wakefield, wrote that his study of 12 children showed that the three vaccines taken together could alter immune systems, causing intestinal woes that then reach, and damage, the brain. In fairly short order, his findings were widely rejected as — not to put too fine a point on it — bunk. Dozens of epidemiological studies found no merit to his work, which was based on a tiny sample. The British Medical Journal went so far as to call his research “fraudulent.” The British journal Lancet, which originally published Dr. Wakefield’s paper, retracted it. The British medical authorities stripped him of his license.

Nonetheless, despite his being held in disgrace, the vaccine-autism link has continued to be accepted on faith by some. Among the more prominently outspoken is Jenny McCarthy, a former television host and Playboy Playmate, who has linked her son’s autism to his vaccination: He got the shot, and then he was not O.K. Post hoc, etc.

This is, of course, even crazier than it sounds. It’s one thing to be skeptical of the scientific community and its debunking of the Wakefield study. But it’s now 2015. MMR vaccines that contain thimerosal—the supposed cause of autism—have been off the market for well over a decade. Not one single child has gotten a dose of thimerosal since about 2002. And yet, autism rates haven’t gone down. They’ve gone up. You don’t need to trust scientists to see that, very plainly, thimerosal simply never played any role in autism. And there’s never been any reason to think that any other vaccine does either.

And yet, there’s apparently nothing that will convince certain parents of this. At least, if there is, no one has figured it out yet. Sigh.

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Here’s the Birth of the Modern Anti-Vax Movement

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Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

by forskolindiet1 Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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This week, Boko Haram, the Islamist terror group based in northern Nigeria, launched a massive attack on the town of Baga, killing dozens, according to Reuters. Other initial reports put the number of dead in the hundreds or thousands. The attack is the latest in the group’s increasingly bloody campaign to establish an Islamic state in the West African country. The group attained international infamy last April after it abducted some 300 girls. More than 200 of them are still missing.

Over the course of this Tuesday and Wednesday, the militants set fire to buildings in Baga and shot indiscriminately at civilians. Nearly the entire town was torched, according to the BBC. Baga, which had roughly 10,000 residents, is now “virtually non-existent,” Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official, told the British news agency.

Here’s more from the BBC:

Those who fled reported that they had been unable to bury the dead, and corpses littered the town’s streets, he said.

Boko Haram was now in control of Baga and 16 neighbouring towns after the military retreated, Mr Bukar said.

While he raised fears that some 2,000 had been killed in the raids, other reports put the number in the hundreds.

The attack follows an assault by Boko Haram on a military base in Baga on Saturday.

The AFP reported late Thursday that the terror group also decimated over a dozen towns and villages surrounding Baga:

Boko Haram launched renewed attacks around a captured town in restive northeast Nigeria this week, razing at least 16 towns and villages, a local government and a union official told AFP.

‘They burnt to the ground all the 16 towns and villages including Baga, Dorn-Baga, Mile 4, Mile 3, Kauyen Kuros and Bunduram,’ said Musa Bukar, head of the Kukawa local government in Borno state.

Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigeria for more than five years. Over the past year, the group has killed more than 10,000 people, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

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Watch the Bullies Who Protest Outside of Abortion Clinics Get Exactly What They Deserve

by GarnetPalafox Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

A video of a pregnant woman delivering a scathing rebuke to a group of anti-abortion protestors outside a London abortion clinic is going viral on social media.

A group of protestors from the British pro-life organization Abort67 gathered in front of the clinic to film women as they entered. In the video, the protestors can be seen denying that they’re filming the women, despite the fact that, curiously enough, they were outfitted with cameras on their chests while standing in front of a bloody fetus banner. With their weak denials quickly dissolving, one of the protestors then owns up but explains that the group regularly records their demonstrations to prevent “false accusations we’re harassing people.” That’s when the woman courageously goes off on the protestors:

“It’s wrong what you’re doing. You don’t know why people are doing what they’re doing, but you want to be out here judging and filming…You’re standing out here making people feel guilty. I think this is wrong on so many levels. Many people have been abused, you don’t know what their reasons are for.”

The woman, who has been identified as an employee of a charity group that assists children in need, then suggests the protestors quit trying to guilt other women and instead help out real vulnerable kids.

Bravo.

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Watch the Bullies Who Protest Outside of Abortion Clinics Get Exactly What They Deserve

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Chevron wants to fund science class. What could go wrong?

by MereditKraker Posted on November 25, 2014

Chevron wants to fund science class. What could go wrong?

By on 24 Nov 2014commentsShare

Chevron’s Fuel Your School program allows K-12 teachers in participating districts to request a chunk of petro-change to implement classroom projects, particularly in STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math. In participating areas, the company contributes $1 toward projects and equipment for every fill-up of at least 30 liters (about 8 gallons) at a local Chevron station. That way, drivers can feel good about buying gasoline, and, in a horrifyingly ironic twist, kids can thank their elders for burning a fuel whose emissions are wrecking their future!

And what does Chevron get in return? A little air time with the kiddos! Check out the company’s propaganda video:

On its website, the megacorporation explains that it is interested in helping “prepare students for the growing number of technical jobs in the modern economy, including possible engineering positions at Chevron.” Ignoring the dubiousness of the “growing number of technical jobs” claim (have they heard of robots?), if Chevron is still hiring petroleum engineers by the time today’s elementary schoolers are looking for work, we’re probably fucked.

The good news? Teachers in Vancouver, B.C., say they want none of the dirty money. Last month, the North Vancouver and West Vancouver school districts both signed up for Fuel Your School, but many incensed teachers are opting out for moral reasons, according to North Shore News. 

“Even the name Fuel Your School, it’s about promoting the idea of an oil product,” said Martin Stuible, vice president of the North Vancouver Teachers’ Association. He also pointed out that accepting Chevron’s money excuses British Columbia’s government from some of its responsibility for funding education — and steers attention away from shortfalls in provincial funding.

Do we really want a company that continues to search for more oil when we’ve already found more than enough to fry us all to have any say in how science and math are taught to the generation charged with cleaning up the climate mess?

Big Oil already corrupts political outcomes with generous donations. To see that same fate befall educational outcomes would be heartbreaking.

Source:
Teachers put brakes on oil money for classrooms

, North Shore News.

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RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

by ArleenFriese Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The rat king is a haunting image from European folklore: a bevy of rats, tangled together by their tails and thought to grow together as a bunch. (Rat king characters also make appearances in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics and the animated show Adventure Time.)

Then there’s RATKING, a left-field hip-hop group that’s one of the most exciting recent acts to come out of New York City. The mythical metaphor is apt. In an age of hypersleek solo rappers like Drake and Kanye, the three-member posse celebrates the grime of the streets, the everyday beauty of faces passing on the subway, the steam rising from manholes.

Together they’re a motley crew, with a lot of growing left to do. The group formed in 2011 and has released two albums since: 2012’s Wiki93 EP and the 2014 full-length So It Goes. The first version of the 2012 EP, before they signed to British label XL, was titled 1993. That’s the birth year of frontman Wiki, a.k.a. Patrick Morales, 21. Hakeem “Hak” Lewis, Wiki’s rapping partner and childhood friend, is a year younger; Eric Adiele, 33, who goes by “Sporting Life,” is the group’s producer.

If you’ve never heard of RATKING, you couldn’t do better than to start with their single “Canal.” The track distills RATKING down to its essence, and the result is like nothing else in contemporary hip-hop. Sporting Life’s lumbering, explosive production hits you first. “I wanted it to be like Dipset meets Three 6 Mafia,” he says, listing some of the group’s canonical influences. “Shit Juelz Santana woulda spit over, Juicy J, Project Pat. But flipping those, running them through weird delays and effects.”

Then come the verses, paeans to Manhattan’s Canal Street—home of pawn shops, hawkers, and travelers of all colors and nationalities, mashed together as densely as Sporting Life’s production. (Or a rat king.) Taken together, the effect is visceral. You can almost smell the streets. Wiki, with his two missing front teeth, shouts over the din of a dirty metropolis, buoyed by the quieter, more poetic Hak’s reflections on his “17 summers” growing up in the city.

Shot in 16mm, the accompanying music video is the perfect complement. Celluloid film isn’t like digital—there’s no previewing or deleting, so what comes back from the lab can often be surprising. And that’s the beauty of the medium, as the video makes clear in an instant. Utterly unpredictable film burns—the washing in and out of colors at the ends of a reel—cut quickly between stunning Technicolor observations of daily life in New York City. Clothes wave from windows; fish stare back from Chinatown aquariums; all types of people walk down sidewalks and alleyways, but we only ever see them from the back. It’s the same teeming city where, by chance one day, Sporting Life watched a teenage Wiki freestyle in a Lower East Side park and approached him on a whim. The song celebrates the vitality of a place that people love to complain has strayed from its creative roots. Wiki pushes back defiantly on his bridge: “Think the city has let up? / Get up, wake up! / Open your eyes, wake up!”

The exhortation is so energetically earnest that never for a moment do you think that this is “rap with a positive message,” proselytizing in any way. All it is is a heartfelt reflection on a world these artists know firsthand. When I ask the group (minus Hak, absent to deal with weed charges he picked up on tour in North Carolina) about their attitude toward politics, the answer is in that mode. “Me personally, I don’t know everything that’s going on, all the current events,” Wiki says. “And I feel like you should be informed as fuck before you start throwing around opinions. But if there’s something in front of you…”

Sporting Life chimes in: “If it comes into your world, hopefully you say something about it, you have an opinion about it.”

Hakeem “Hak” Lewis at Lollapalooza 2014. Daniel Patlán/Flickr

This is the spirit most memorably on display in their track “Remove Ya,” where over a grimy, UK-influenced beat, Wiki and Hak trade bars about facing police harassment just for being teenagers in New York. Half-Puerto Rican, half-Irish Wiki riffs off the well-circulated Nation recording of an NYPD officer stopping and frisking a guy (“for being a fucking mutt“): “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah, we some mutts.”

It’s a telling hook for a song that could easily carry so much anger and resentment. RATKING’s world is not so much a battle between good and evil as a constant assertion of life in all its wonder against the forces of boredom, bureaucracy, and routine. It’s a party where everyone’s invited, and the only foul is being dull.

In that way, the music is stridently youthful, which makes sense. Two out of three of the band’s members still live with their parents, after all. So how have the folks reacted to their sons’ remarkable success, their multiple national tours before they were old enough to drink legally? “My mom’s definitely been really cool,” Wiki says. “She’s always been very supportive of me in the arts,” he says, emphasizing the words self-mockingly. Okay, but what about all the rhymes about smoking weed and getting drunk? “She knows that I smoke weed. She knows that I drink,” he says. “She probably doesn’t understand fully…” They laugh. “But I would never filter, you know?” Wiki goes on. “In regular life, I filter more than in my music.”

“Anyway,” he adds, “I think I’m gonna move out when I get back. My mom’s actually moving to a new cr—apartment.” Presumably he was about to say “crib,” but stopped himself. It’s incontrovertibly the case that the members of RATKING, for all the hooliganism in their image, are remarkably mature in person. The Fader‘s T. Cole Rachel noted that they’re an “immediately and strikingly polite” bunch, the type to throw a smoke bomb at a Fashion Week party (as Wiki did in the 10th grade) but then sit and read Kurt Vonnegut, whose refrain in Slaughterhouse-Five inspired the name of their last album.

I was surprised by how eager they were to listen, how often they’d stop to ask if they were making sense. That unusual openness is also apparent in their wide range of declared influences, which go way beyond hip-hop to include the 1970s no wave scene, ’50s film noir, the nonlinear storytelling of director Harmony Korine, and even, Wiki insists, the freethinking spirit of former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, “that chubby little motherfucker.”

How do you take all of that and make a cohesive sound? Here, too, the thoughtfulness of the approach belies the band’s youthful aura. “The longer people don’t know about what you’re working on, the stronger it gets,” Sporting Life explains. “Being present and able to recognize what’s ill around you creates kind of like an ill void. You pick enough things out of that void and put them together, and you can create something that glides through people’s consciousnesses.” And that process is painstakingly iterative. “There’s this period where you’re just adding, taking all these elements,” Wiki says. “But then you have to start moving toward the simplest form.”

“And that takes work,” notes Sporting Life. “It’s like when you see a tai-chi master. It’s so much work up until being able to do that, but it looks so simple. And we’re closer to that now than we’ve ever been.”

Eric Adiele, a.k.a. Sporting Life. Stuart McAlpine/Flickr

The group is now touring with kindred alternative rap acts Run the Jewels and Despot while working on a 7-track project, 700 Fill (like the fill power of a jacket). Look for the new release in January or February. “If we miss the winter, it’s not coming out ’til next winter,” Wiki says. “It’s a winter album.”

After I’m done, the band members check to see if I have any lingering questions, considerate as ever—did I get everything I need? Actually, I would like to know one more thing. As perceptive young artists, what worries and excites them the most about our culture today?

Wiki fingers the toothbrush he’s been holding in anticipation of a preshow shower. He frowns. “You know,” he says, raising the brush like a staff, “the same shit that worries me excites me.” Sporting Life concurs: “I mean, there’s little to be worried about, really…There’s a lot you can do these days, just sitting in a bedroom or wherever. The individual has really been empowered if they have time to just sit and build. Just try not to be bored.”

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RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

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Half of All Summers Will Soon Be Boiling Hot for Hundreds of Millions of People

by JeanK77hdeizk Posted on October 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last year was an absolute scorcher in China. In the eastern part of the country, more than a half-billion people sweltered through 31 days with daily maximum temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit or more, a historical record. The heat wave killed dozens of people. Nightmare-inducing crowds swamped public pools and beaches. NASA reported that Shanghai broke its all-time temperature record three times in as many weeks. The blistering heat was accompanied by a drought that afflicted the country’s food bowl, the Yangtze River basin, that cost China around $9.6 billion. The Associated Press reported at the time that “folks are grilling shrimp on manhole covers, eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard has mysteriously caught fire by itself.”

Now the verdict is in: China better get used to it. New research released Sunday reveals that 2013 was not just some statistical blip—and man-made climate change is likely the main culprit. In just two decades, 50 percent of summers are likely to be hotter than the one Chinese people suffered through in 2013, according to the study. That means extreme summers like last year’s, which normally only happen once every 270 years, could happen every other year.

The research was conducted by the China Meteorological Administration, the Canadian government, and a researcher from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and is featured in the latest edition of the science journal Nature Climate Change. The team analyzed historical climate data in eastern China, and found that man-made climate change has caused a 60-fold increase in the likelihood of extreme temperatures since the early 1950s, when reliable national records began. Similarly hot summers are becoming increasingly likely, they found. Heat waves are also starting earlier and ending later. The five hottest summers in China since records began all happened since 2000, according to the report.

“Human influence has produced a very large increase in the probability of clustering of extremely hot summers in the twenty-first century and of long-lasting severe heat waves such as that of 2013,” the researchers write. “The increase in summer heat, combined with the region’s rising population and wealth, would produce higher risks for human health, agricultural systems and energy production and distribution systems if sufficient adaptation measures are not in place.”

The link established by the report’s authors to man-made climate change adds yet another worry for China’s leaders, who are already battling an ongoing air pollution crisis that is currently blanketing the country’s north in extreme smog. China already has an alarming climate rap sheet: It is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases and the world’s top coal producer and consumer; some 70 percent of its energy supply comes from coal. As Chinese leaders throw every new technology—including fracking—at breaking its decades-long coal addiction, China promised world leaders at UN climate talks that it would peak its emissions “as early as possible”—the first time a high-ranking Chinese government official has mentioned such a target. China has also recently promised to start a nationwide cap-and-trade program to put a price on its carbon emissions.

Tourists in Beijing walk through thick smog on October 9; local authorities raised the smog alert to orange, the second-highest level. Imaginechina/AP

The report is the latest in a string of new research linking last year’s heat waves around the world—in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and Europe—to climate change with an ever-increasing amount of scientific certainty.

Martin P. Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who reviewed the study for me during an interview, said the Chinese results are useful in understanding why heat waves are happening more often around the globe. “We can generalize some of the heat wave experiences in China from these authors to other areas.”

Hoerling, who called Sunday’s Chinese study “solid” and “entirely consistent” with previous findings, edited a supplement to last month’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that summarized results from 20 separate research groups analyzing 16 different events in 2013. They found that while the climate change connection to events like droughts and storms remained unclear, scientifically, “human-caused climate change greatly increased the risk for the extreme heat waves.” The combined research shows that long heat waves are as much as 10 times more likely due to human-induced climate change.

Hoerling said that the authors of this latest Chinese study may even be taking a slightly conservative approach to “some of the more severe consequences that ongoing warming would have if you pushed this out a little bit into the second half of the 21st century.”

The 2013 heat wave in China, he said, would be a “cold summer for those living in the latter half of the 21st century in this area if we continue on our pathway of emissions.”

Environment Canada, a government department, declined to make their lead researcher for the study, Zhang Xuebin, available for interview, and did not respond to written questions—a practice that appears consistent with widely reported policies that bar government researchers, including climate scientists, from discussing their work with journalists. A survey last year of 4000 Canadian researchers revealed widespread “muzzling” of federal scientists.

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Half of All Summers Will Soon Be Boiling Hot for Hundreds of Millions of People

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What the Hell Is Going On in North Korea? Here Are the 5 Best Rumors About Kim Jong-Un

by UIALeonard Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un—known as “Supreme Leader,” or “Fatty the Third,” depending on where you are—has been conspicuously absent over the past month. At a July event, he was seen walking with a limp, and he hasn’t made a public appearance since September 3rd. That’s unusual for Kim, who made 25 public appearances in July alone. North Korean State media was forced to admit he’d been suffering from “discomfort.”

Most observers figured Kim was sidelined with gout, which might as well be a Kim family tradition. Today, Kim was expected to make a comeback for a deeply important annual event—the anniversary of the founding of North Korea’s Workers’ Party. He was, shockingly, a no-show. No one ever knows what’s really happening in North Korea, but the rumor mill, abuzz for weeks, has gone wild with speculation. Here’s some of the craziest rumors the world’s come up with to explain Kim’s extended absence:

1. Kim is being phased out as leader of North Korea. Some version of this is fast becoming a popular take on the situation. The Daily Beast‘s Gordon C. Chang posited that Kim may have been “politically weak” this whole time and kept around as a pawn because of the cult of personality surrounding his family. Chang suggests that a shadowy group of army officials—led by Gen. Hwang Pyong So—could be moving to take power, rendering Kim nothing more than a figurehead.

2. There was a straight-up coup, and Kim fled. In a more extreme version of Rumor 1, some are saying that Kim did indeed exercise total control, and that a coup was staged to get rid of him. People are even saying his wife was executed. Super-credible “Pyongyang watchers” point to tightened security in the capital, an odd shuffle of party leaders and dissatisfaction with Kim’s violent rule to back this one up. So who’d want to take him out? The army is a candidate, as is Kim’s powerful but little-known younger sister, who could’ve made a play. If you’re wondering how seriously to take these rumors, consider that some people thought a particular general—Vice Marshal Jo Myong-Rok—overthrew Kim. That guy is dead.

3. Kim was addicted to cheese. Judging from state media coverage, Kim has steadily put on weight since taking power. His alleged cheese addiction—he’s rumored to have sent out officials to procure rare, expensive cheese in Europe—may be the culprit. An Indian newspaper reported that cheese-induced gout didn’t strike Kim: apparently, his ankles broke because he got too fat. So, he may be recovering in a hospital, or cheese rehab.

4. Kim got too excited in a military drill and injured himself. A British tabloid alleged, among other things, that Kim walked with a limp after involving himself in a military drill. After “crawling” and “rolling around,” he’s said to have “injured his ankle and knee… because he is overweight.”

5. Kim is fine! North Korean officials insist there’s no problem—health-related or otherwise. “We must firmly establish the monolithic leadership system of Kim Jong Un,” North Korea’s state-run newspaper said. Guess that settles it.

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What the Hell Is Going On in North Korea? Here Are the 5 Best Rumors About Kim Jong-Un

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See for Yourself Just How Damn Complicated the Middle East Has Become

by CarolBiddlecomb Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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David McCandless/The Information Is Beautiful Project

Behold, the Middle East! If we could just understand what all the strong countries, the falling-apart countries, the unrecognized-countries, the “non-state actors”, and the outside powers all thought of each other, we might be able to chart a clear way forward, right? Don’t get your hopes up, although the latest project by British data visionary David McCandless is a really valiant effort to make sense of it all nonetheless.

McCandless’ charted 38 regional players— from Afghanistan to Yemen, Al Qaeda to the European Union— and connected each to its major friends and enemies. The result is a tangled ball that illustrates the enormously complicated relationships in the region. (You can parse each actor’s relationships on the full, interactive version on McCandless’ site, Information Is Beautiful, which you should really check out.)

McCandless calls this work an “ongoing, evolving diagram,” so it may be missing a few connections (Russia’s close, getting closer relationship with Iraq, for instance). If you have more ideas, he welcomes input at the email address posted on his site.

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See for Yourself Just How Damn Complicated the Middle East Has Become

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Take Two: What’s Behind the Religious Conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq

by Ryan44Swxlkc Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I recommended a Fareed Zakaria video about the roots of the current civil wars in Syria and Iraq. Sam Barkin, a professor at UMass Boston, emails to say that Zakaria’s history is faulty:

While reading your post of about an hour ago on arming the Syrian rebels, I clicked on the embedded video of Fareed Zakaria’s five-minute historical primer. He makes what seems to be a compelling case about the historical complexities of Syria. There’s just one problem. His history is wrong. Really quite wrong, in a way that makes me worry about his analysis.

He claims that three contemporary countries in the Levant—Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—were intentionally set up by the European colonial countries with minority-rule governments, explicitly for divide-and-rule purposes. In Iraq, it’s true, the monarchy was Sunni (it also wasn’t Iraqi, but that’s a different story). The British did deal with the local elites, as they tended to do in their protectorates, and the local elites were by and large Sunni, but that was a pre-existing condition.

However, in the two French-protectorate countries, Syria and Lebanon, the French at no point tried to empower minorities at the expense of ethnic/religious majorities. In Syria, which is roughly three-quarters Sunni, almost all of the heads of state and government until 1970 (it may in fact be all of them, I didn’t have the patience to check) were Sunni. The central role of the Shiite Alawites in the security service did not begin until after Assad senior consolidated power after the 1970 coup. And I can assure you that the French were not fans either of Assad or of the Ba’ath party more generally. Lebanon, meanwhile, was designed by the French specifically to be Christian majority (in fact, the French redrew the map of Lebanon in 1920 to ensure such a majority). The Christians probably remained a majority in Lebanon into the 1960s.

So telling the story of Syria (either current Syria or Greater Syria) as one of a history of sectarianism and minority rule is simply historically factually wrong. And it leaves me wondering if Zakaria really doesn’t know the history, or if he’s taking some serious historical liberties in order to make his point.

In a nutshell, Barkin is saying that only in Iraq can you argue that a minority-rule government was originally installed by a colonial power. In Lebanon it was a case of demographic changes turning a Christian majority into a minority, and in Syria the minority Alawites took power long after the French had withdrawn. Zakaria is right that in all three cases, conflict between religious minorities and majorities are still central to what’s going on today, but the historical backdrop is more complicated than he allows.

I thought this was worth passing along. Anyone else care to weigh in?

Link: 

Take Two: What’s Behind the Religious Conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq

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Are Your Kids’ Rainbow Bracelets Toxic?

by AnnelieMackenna Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bracelets and other trinkets made on the wildly popular Rainbow Loom—a toy that allows kids to weave together brightly colored elastic bands—could contain cancer-causing chemicals, a British laboratory has found.

In a study commissioned by a British toy retailer, the Assay Laboratory in Birmingham, United Kingdom, tested charms meant to be attached to bracelets and necklaces woven on the looms. The researchers found that while Rainbow Loom’s own name-brand products were safe, some charms made by knockoff brands contained high levels of phthalates, a class of carcinogenic chemicals. Some of the knockoff charms were composed of as much as 50 percent (by weight) phthalates, the Irish blog Mummy Pages reports. (It’s currently illegal in the United States to sell a toy that contains more than 0.1 percent of six kinds of phthalates, though some products still slip through the cracks.)

Marion Wilson, a spokeswoman from the lab, told Mummy Pages that while only the charms were tested, it was likely that the bands themselves also contained phthalates. In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson declined to share the names of the brands that were found to have high phthalate levels. “We would never share our customer information as it is clearly commercially sensitive,” she wrote. “However, please note that the customers that have received test results like this will have tested the product prior to it going on the market.” It’s unclear whether the brands tested at the lab are sold in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom.

Phthalates aren’t the only dangerous thing about Rainbow Looms: BuzzFeed notes other horrors, including injuries to children. Animal advocates in the Philippines say that the bands can harm creatures that swallow them.

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