A report published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine claims that male babies of women who use insect repellents during the first three months of pregnancy appear to be at increased risk for a uro-genital birth defect called hypospadias.
"This is the junk science story of the day," says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. "I want to know how they come up with these hypotheses."
"They don't even know that, since they don't come up with hypotheses. It's all data dredging," says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. "They find kids with hypospadias and give their parents a long questionnaire, then they plug all the answers into a computer and look for correlations. If any possible hypothesis turns out a p-value greater than 0.05 they say, 'Voila!' They couldn't find specific chemicals responsible, but they found out that a lot of these moms used bug spray, so they publish that. What are we supposed to make of this?"
