How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

SIDs, while still too common, has dropped 70% in the U.S. since the "back-to-sleep" effort and the general awareness of the situation. Children under 6 months don't have a reflex to carbon dioxide poisoning, and their respiratory systems aren't fully developed, so it is easier for them to suffocate on their own breath pooling in too-soft mattresses or cribs with polyester blankets or bumpers. Risk factors for SIDs death include: winter, cigarette smoke exposure, respiratory illness, not breast-feeding, and not sleeping in the same room as an adult.

The thing I hate about articles like this is that the path to snarky redditisms is very, very direct.

I'm not disagreeing with your message, I'm disagreeing with the delivery.

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.

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 not treating furniture with flame-retardant chemicals (the status quo when I was a child) and treating it (the status quo for quite a while now in the United States) will take careful examination of the actual risk ratios of any disease said to be correlated with the chemicals, the risk ratios of injuries and deaths from fires, the cost of other preventive measures for each kind of harm, and so on. Public policy is not easy. The best public policies have to be carefully examined in light of verifiable facts.

I see from user danso's profile

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danso

that he has a professional role in investigative journalism, and indeed I have enjoyed reading (and of course have upvoted) many of his comments here on HN over the past year. The piece submitted here mentions about its author that "Dashka Slater is the author of six books for children and adults. Her latest children’s book, 'Dangerously Ever After,' is out this month," which prompted me to look up other information about the author. Her personal website

http://www.dashkaslater.com/index.php/journalist

declares that she has written pieces for a variety of publications, many in the "alternative" market for periodical articles, and her LinkedIn profile

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dashkaslater

declares her educational background. There is some interesting reporting here, but as a regular reader of Mother Jones (one of the publications that most often publishes her work) and of other "alternative" publications, I would like to see more follow-up on this issue before writing to my elected representatives, as I sometimes do, asking for a change in current law. I do remember when newspaper and magazine articles in my childhood were all about the fearsome dangers of fires killing little children.

A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

since 1960, so new regulations introduced since then so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then. Perhaps the purported flame-retardant chemicals don't prevent as many fires as people suppose. But perhaps they also don't cause any serious human illness in actual use. Let's not rush to judgment on this issue, but let's do actual, verifiable science that with sound economic and policy analysis can help guide lawmakers to the best currently available trade-off in regulation.