Think you’re having a bad day? These researchers made a classic decimal point error which led to a global panic about black cooking utensils.
In a worse-than-average day at the office, three researchers have had to admit that they made a decimal point error in a paper on flame retardant contamination – putting their results off by an order of magnitude.
Oops.
The paper, which was published in Chemosphere last year, looked at brominated flame retardants specific to electronics being used in some non-electronic items sold in the United States.
It specifically looked at black plastic products coming into contact with either food (e.g. spatulas) or mouths more generally (e.g. delicious rubbery toys that teething tots may have a gnaw on).
The researchers’ running theory was that the hard, black plastic casings used as housing for electronics, which therefore contained electronic-specific flame-retardant polymers, was making its way into recycled plastic supply chains and being reconstituted into items that very much do not need to be flame retardant, like hair barrettes.
Whether or not those polymers were present and potentially leaching into food or tiny mouths is a question worth answering, given that brominated flame retardants are associated with carcinogenicity, endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity and reproductive and developmental toxicity.
Fears were seemingly confirmed when their calculations indicated that the daily intake of decabromodiphenyl ether in contaminated utensils was 34,700ng/day – alarmingly close to 42,000ng/day, which they believed to be the safe level of exposure for a 60kg adult.
Fortunately for the black-spatula owners out there (note to self: hard to find spatulas that aren’t black? Sense an opportunity here) the correct value for a 60kg adult is actually 420,000ng/day.
The error had flown under the noses of peer reviewers, and was only picked up months after the article was published.
Despite that somewhat humbling Big Oops, the researchers claimed that this calculation error did not affect the overall conclusions of the paper, which are that products made with recycled content can contain potentially hazardous flame retardants.
Sned yore storie tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.