Although I am somewhat in agreement that anecdotes are not evidence, I am also aware that the term "anecdotal evidence" first came into wide spread useage after the citizens in Calif were able to get Proposition 65 on the ballot and then made law. This proposition's requirements so terrified the pesticide manufacturers that they needed to make sure that it didn't get passed in other states. (After all it was bad enough for industry that the then 25 million folks in Calif would have some protection against the over rampant use of toxins.)
Foremost among those who were alarmed was Monsanto. After all, back in the late 60's early 70's, Monsanto's execs had actually lied to the EPA in order to get their product RoundUp, currently the best selling herbicide in the word, licensed for over the counter sales. The lie was regarding the type of aldehyde utilized in the product's formulation. At that point in time the aldehyde was formaldehyde, which by the 1980's had become one of Prop 65's no-no's. (RoundUp consists of 41% glyphosate, 15% polyoxyethalenamine, or POEA, which bio degrades into dioxane, and then an aldehyde, no longer formaldehyde, and then the rest is water.)
It was this knee jerk reaction against Prop 65 that then brought forth the notion that all observations were silly and useless and only the confirmation of the totally rushed-through, short time lapse "studies" were relevant. So we end up in an era wherein after the BP oil spill, the execs at BP want to use one of their own products, Corexit, to assist in "cleansing the Gulf" of the oil. EPA scientists were directed to study fish put into tanks with Corexit for a number of weeks.
Then the researchers were to determine if the fish were still healthy. Apparently they were, and the fish were released. However one scientist knew that was too short a time period and he kept his research subjects in their tanks for a month or six weeks longer. Those fish all died prematurely in relationship to their species normal age ranges. But did BP care? No, of course not. Now they could sell the various government agencies their Corexit, make a huge profit, have a nice PR pitch to the citizens who lived near the Gulf. As after all, who cares if they were further hurting the marine life of the Gulf! (As long as the EPA approved study showed otherwise.)
Observation was always Step One in deciding on formulating a hypothesis and then working out a study. Back in the 1700's, Ed Jenner observed fewer than fifty cow maids becoming infected with cow pox, but then all going on to live through small pox epidemics. This was due to the hypothesis Jenner promoted, which in our day and age would be considered based on mere anecdotal evidence, that the cowpox had provided these ladies immunity. There were no world class labs where he could validate his theory.
Today there are plenty of world class laboratories. Unfortunately, many if not all of them inside the USA are under the control of Corporate-controlled scientists. Does anyone here think that after UC Berkeley received a 50 million dollar grant that any students or researchers there would be able to propose a look at Novartis' products to see if they were a source for the burgeoning breast cancer rates among San Francisco women? So many times, we activists see decent studies done at great expense to the independent scientists whoa re hell bent on The Truth. If someone here can show me one time wherein one of these decent but small-ish studies is taken seriously by Big Corporate-America and then Industry expands upon the study after small time researchers bring forth disturbing results, I would be greatly relieved. (Usually there is instead an immediate press release that So and So's recent study regarding Product X is totally worthless as the number of test subjects was too small, and that fact alone means So and So should be made into a pariah and black listed from serious consideration forever more!)
So if some researcher puts together a study showing that disturbing the gut flora and embedding the stomach and/or intestinal lining of young children with measles virus can trigger a massive and complex neurological series that causes the children so studied to then regress from talking and speaking, socially communicating children into autistic patients, there is little likelihood of this study being done on a large scale basis. Rather than industry being intrigued and also concerned that their practice of insisting children receive multi-injections of vaccines at one time, they made a pariah out of the man whose peer-reviewed study showed a serious concern for alarm at the idea of continuing multi vaccinations in one day for children under three years of age. Again if someone here can show me ONE SINGLE INSTANCE wherein a scientist who has a small study that needs to be expanded on can then watch as concerned industry executives guarantee the study is undertaken with a larger number of test subjects, I would be quite grateful. Until that instance is demonstrated to me, I will be suspicious of the Industry Giants telling us activists that our concerns are based on mere "anecdotal evidence."
