What is the reason behind California cancer warning labels? Literally everything seems to be causing cancer. I just bought a few s2s maple boards from a local lumber supplier and each one had a sticker saying it’s known to the State of California to cause cancer. A maple board? There’s no treatment or paint on it. It’s just a milled and poorly planed piece of lumber.
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>Literally everything seems to be causing cancer.
Pretty much everything *is* causing cancer.
At a very basic level, whenever a cell’s mechanisms interact with pretty much *anything*, they have a slight chance of being thrown off and going wrong, which is what causes cancer.
Some things are much more likely to disturb the mechanisms. At the extreme end you have things like hard radiation.
The “this can cause cancer” labels aren’t actually *wrong* in most cases. Yes, it’s true that companies will slap them on without even testing to check if the “known chemicals” are in there, but it doesn’t really matter; most of the time they’ll be correct. Point at any random thing in your house and say “this increases my chance of cancer” and you will almost certainly be right.
The problem is that this isn’t saying *how much* it increases your chance of cancer.
Let’s say that the baseline for cancer is that in a million people, a hundred will develop cancer every year. A million people touch substance 1 and after a year, five hundred thousand of them have cancer. A million people touch substance 2 and after a year, a hundred and one of them have cancer.
Both substances technically increase your risk of cancer. Substance 1 is a clear and immediate carcinogenic threat. Any reasonable person would want to stay away from it. Substance 2 is not. Most people are not worried about a one-in-a-million chance of getting cancer.
The warning labels, among other issues, have such a low threshold for causing cancer that they are beyond what most people consider a “reasonable threshold”.
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