Michael Fumento
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Michael Fumento is an American author, journalist, and attorney who writes about science and health issues, such as obesity, the health dangers of breast implants, teen drug use, Agrarian utopianism, and AIDS.
Many of his articles argue that a huge number of claims of danger to society are later found to be based on egregiously bad statistics or misinterpreted statistics. He wrote a series of articles on the banned agricultural chemical Alar, which at one point was claimed to be killing humans by giving them cancer; later reviews of the evidence extant at the time showed that in the amounts of consumed by humans, there was no evidence that the compound causes cancer.
A common theme of Fumento's work is that many liberal environmental groups have a hysterical response to most man-made chemicals. He holds that while liberal environmental groups will willingly accept claims that man-made compunds are carcinogenic, they gloss over the fact that often times these compounds are only found to be carcinogenic in quantities millions of times larger than any human being would ever ingest. In contrast, Fumento writes that this is also true of most natural chemical compounds found in natural foods. In Fumento's view, one cannot ban all man-made chemicals as unsafe, and promote naturally occurring molecules as safe; he holds that there is no scientific basis for this belief.
Fumento is considered by many people to be politically conservative. He has has drawn criticism from liberal groups for his views on Gulf War Syndrome, and for his 1990s writings which stated that the threat of AIDS to the heterosexual population was greatly overstated. He promotes a position of "skepticism" towards claims that man-made chemicals cause cancer in humans. However, Fumento has also been outspoken in his support of stem cell research and hydrogen fuel cell technology.
Fumento is, or has been, a member of the following organizations:
- American Enterprise Institute
- Competitive Enterprise Institute
- Consumer Alert
- Hudson Institute, senior fellow
See also: junk science, scientific skepticism
Books
- The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS
- Science Under Siege
- Polluted Science
- The Fat of the Land
- BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World
External links
- Michael Fumento's website (http://www.fumento.com)
- Deltoid on Fumento's criticisms of the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq (http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/11#fumento2)