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How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

nytimes.com

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Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#111

Post by reedlaw »

sp332 wrote: post #96
tsotha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't count if you die in a fire, either. The reality is with this kind of thing we're really off into rounding errors. To the extent you can affect your odds of getting cancer, the extent to which you do the things your mother told you to do (don't smoke, don't drink, eat your vegetables, and don't get too fat) swamps your cancer risk from environmental sources.

Just don't eat broccoli. Broccoli contains mutagens. http://www.biomedsearch.com/nih/Genotoxicity-studies-organic...

That's not what I got from that abstract. Rather, broccoli has little cancer-preventative effect on fruit flies.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#112

Post by igrekel »

_delirium wrote: post #71
igrekel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in the insurance industry, I can tell you there are less and less fires. The main cause are that there are less people who smoke and that old electrical wiring are replaced by the newer standards.

In urban areas, at the level of units or buildings, aren't improved regulations leading to better fire containment, and/or improved firefighting response and techniques, likely to be contributors as well? There are still apartment fires in Manhattan and Chicago, but they seem much more contained than in the past, with whole-building and especially multi-block conflagrations now quite rare.

I am not sure on that point this reality didn't affect the area I was working on. What I do know is that the number of fires has severely decreased (nearly halved just in the last 5 years). If the number of fires, the ammount claimed per fire has increased dramatically, part of that is the price of building material, work hours and just the value of the insured assets. But it doesn't seem that having fire retardant makes fires any smaller.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#113

Post by vm »

tptacek wrote: post #77
rdl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume flame retardants are mainly only needed for couches of smokers (I've never randomly put a flame onto my couch for fun to see if it would burn), so even if fire retardants save 100 people from fires they caused through voluntary negligence while subjecting 1 additional person to cancer or other illness due to chemicals, I'm not sure if it's a fair trade. Saving firefighters might be a reasonable argument, tho…

Do we know that anyone has contracted cancer as a result of flame retardants used in furniture? I re-read the article looking for clear evidence, and what I saw on close read was weasel-wording: when direct health effects are being talked about, the subject of the sentence becomes "flame retardants" rather than a specific chemical; when lax investigations become a topic, it's the EPA's laxity (the EPA isn't solely re…

Do we know that any lives have been saved as a result of flame retardants being used in furniture?

The article suggests that flame retardants do not slow down furniture fires in real world scenarios. The problem is that they are used in only the foam padding. The couch fabric is not treated. The foam itself appears to offer little resistance to fire if it is already covered in flames (like if fabric is on fire). This is where more research is needed.

If the chemicals don't slow down furniture fires and save lives, then there is no value to having them inside foam.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#114

Post by lignuist »

rfzabick wrote: post #109
lignuist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is called "Relax" and is manufactured by an austrian company. http://www.relax-bettsysteme.at/en

Are you in the states? How did you order it? I could only find a link for finding dealers in Europe.

No, I'm in the EU and bought it from a local dealer. However, I wouldn't order such a bed without having tested it. There are some parameters like the thickness and the softness of the mattress that should be adjusted to your needs, but maybe the Manufacturer ships also to the US when they get an order.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#115

Post by rdl »

tptacek wrote: post #108
rdl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is? OSHA on the industrial side, and CPSC on the consumer side?

OSHA and EPA have overlapping missions on chemical toxicity, don't they?

Well, EPA is really more "systemic" risk of chemicals, I think. It regulates chemicals at point of production and use mainly to prevent systemic environmental issues later on.

I was mostly wondering who regulates this stuff for point of consumption by consumers -- OSHA is pretty clearly focused on production or use in business, not in the home, and CPSC isn't really so "sciencey" as OSHA or EPA -- it's more concerned with grossly apparent problems with products like swallowing magnets and decapitation in cribs.

I don't know who proactively looks for risks of products in long-term exposure/normal use on a long basis. Arguably the non-consumers with the most to care about that would be health insurers, so either an industry association of those or a regulator or a government insurer (medicare/medicaid) would have an interest in doing something like Underwriters Laboratories.

Not that health insurers do such a good job at anything that we really want them to expand to looking at home furnishings and such.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#116

Post by tsotha »

zafirk wrote: post #3

between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me

Not me. For one thing, keep in mind these people are selling page views. If the headline was "Odds of being diagnosed with brain parasite at .00061%", would you even bother reading the story? Dividing things out is a big anxiety stopper.

And think about it when you see something like "...100% increase in your risk of brain cancer," since it represents the doubling of a very small number. Taking percentages of percentages is a sneaky way to make things look more important than they really are.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#117

Post by sp332 »

reedlaw wrote: post #111
sp332 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't eat broccoli. Broccoli contains mutagens. http://www.biomedsearch.com/nih/Genotoxicity-studies-organic...

That's not what I got from that abstract. Rather, broccoli has little cancer-preventative effect on fruit flies.

Broccoli has some mutagenic properties, and some anti-mutagenic properties. This study was to see whether the overall effect was more damage or more protection, and the damage won.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#119

Post by ScottBurson »

pmorici wrote: post #95
tokenadult wrote: post #49

Another top-level comment wrote: between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me And I guess that's why my all-time favorite external link to share here on Hacker News is "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. To resolve the issue of the safety trade-offs of no…

I think the thing that is reflexively offensive about this whole thing is that the government has taken a risk that is reasonably easy for a responsible adult to avoid (setting their couch on fire) and implemented a measure that is harmful and difficult or almost impossible to avoid. It's as if we are all made to pay for the morons who can't resist playing with matches in their couch.

I'm inclined to agree, but see this comment upthread about smokers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494407

I'm hard put to believe I could be that careless even if I were a smoker, but apparently some people are.

Anyway, as a matter of policy, maybe as smoking continues to become less popular (here's hoping) it will seem less like a good trade to provide some very slight protection against smokers setting their furniture on fire at the cost of exposing all of us to carcinogens.

Re: How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

#120

Post by ScottBurson »

Alex3917 wrote: post #104
usefulcat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it seems that smokers (at least in the US) are much more likely to go outside to smoke now, even when at their own home. Sorry, no data just personal recollections from childhood in the '80s.

This seems correct anecdotally. At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside, so maybe this had some effect.

It's certainly much less bad for the other people around you, like your children.
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