Toxic Timber-How Your Deck Could Make You Sick (Darwin Award Candidate)

WKRC ^ | Published: 11/16 10:33 am | WKRC

[Eric in the Ozarks]

You might investigate the phrase “rabbit ear assay.” Its a test where suspected chemicals are smeared on rabbits’ ears to determine the carcinogecity of the products. Creosote fails. The rabbit dies.
Your arguments are unscientific and based only on your experience and oft-told tales.
When the refinery where I worked ran the above analysis on our clarified oil, our legal department ordered a revision of the MSDS to limit the product’s use as a burner fuel, not a carrier for creosote.
Consider yourself fortunate to have not developed cancerous tumors or skin cancer.

[s2brutus]

Good God, man.

LOTS of things will cause cancer if left in continuous contact with tissue. That’s hardly a new revelation.

If you get it on you, WASH IT OFF! Rabbits don’t know any better. Human beings are supposed to.

This isn’t brain surgery.

And just for general scientific interest, I’d LOVE to see the protocols for the tests done on the rabbits. You don’t suppose they’d be anything like the ones done on lab rats to prove that saccharin caused cancer? You know, the ones where the rats were given a dose that was equal to a human consuming something like 30-40 diet sodas a day over 20+ years.....????

As with most things, it’s all about the dosage. Beechwood-derived creosote has even been used in many medicines over the years. Lots of potentially harmful things were used in medicines. Mercury, for example? All of these things were beneficial in small doses, but nobody was recommending using it all day, everyday for years at a time. If you painted yourself with Mercurchrome daily for a period of years you’d probably develop skin or other cancers as well. But if used only occasionally as an anti-septic it worked quite well; better in fact than most other crap on the market today.

You’re using the typical horribly skewed test regimes that have long been used by “anti’s” of various stripes to try to prove your case, when all it proves is that heavy, continuous, and prolonged exposure to many things is bad for us. Creosote is hardly alone in that regard.

Tell me, if you’re cleaning the bathroom in your home and you spill Lysol or some similar product on your skin, do you just leave it there and reapply it daily, or do you wash it off?

It’s simply a matter of common sense.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I'll defer to your scientific knowledge, such as it is.