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While you are waiting for the arrival of the Avian flu pandemic, the Vancouver Sun believes it’s important that you maintain a constant state of worry, preferably about everything you might come into contact with outside of a hermetically sealed hypo-allergenic bubble.

Thankfully, there are numerous apocalyptic websites out there to provide quick, downloadable content to fill the news hole, which the Sun did in a recent feature titled the “Top 10 most common environmental toxins.”

The content comes from wellness guru Dr. Joseph Mercola, who, the paper fails to note, doesn’t really feel good about mainstream medicine, vaccination, prescription drugs, and, naturally enough, the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Mercola is against contraceptive pills – recommending that women should “Avoid birth control pills like the plague" and, instead, use natural contraceptive methods like withdrawal. He is against the HPV vaccine, and is suspicious of the claim that HIV causes AIDS; he does not appear to believe that either condition should be treated with drugs.

Among the inordinately long list of things Mercola is not exactly keen on, there is pasteurized milk, soy, pretty much every kind of grain, potato chips, bottled water, burning incense, artificial sweeteners, chlorinated swimming pools, fluoride in water, Viagra, microwave ovens, cynicism, and allowing your pet to fight a porcupine.

He warns that winning the lottery puts you at risk from dying early.

Mercola has been warned by the Food and Drug Administration about making unsubstantiated claims for products advertised on his website (see here and here).

Unfortunately, there is no such penalty for exaggeration when it comes to Dr. Mercola’s thoughts on “environmental toxins.”

For instance, he claims that PCBS in farmed salmon put you at risk of cancer. The risk, based on the average PCB levels in farmed salmon in the U.S. found three years ago, is one in 100,000, if you ate eight ounces of raw salmon with the skin on each month for 70 years. This risk is so tiny as to be hypothetical.

In October 2006, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and a collaboration between Harvard’s Medical School, School of Public Health, and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital dismissed most of the risks of chemicals in fish as being inconclusive or negligible relative to fish’s dietary benefits.

According to Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health,

“The levels of PCBs and dioxins in fish species are low, similar to other commonly consumed foods such as beef, chicken, pork, eggs, and butter. Importantly, the possible health risks of these low levels of PCBs and dioxins in fish are only a small fraction of the much better established health benefits of the omega-3 fatty acids.

For example, for farmed salmon, the cardiovascular benefits are greater than the cancer risks by a factor of at least 300:1. With the exception of some locally caught sport fish from contaminated inland waters, the levels of PCBs and dioxins in fish should not influence decisions about fish intake.”

Only nine percent of the PCBs and dioxins in the U.S. food supply come from seafood, while over 90 percent comes from other food.

This is the kind of detail that doesn’t seem to trouble Dr. Mercola, – or the editors of the Vancouver Sun. In fact, none of the risks, whether the obviously dangerous (asbestos) or the not obviously dangerous (phthalates) are put in a proper scientific context, which involves equating the level of human exposure with demonstrable risk. Anything can be toxic if you ingest enough of it – and in Dr. Mercola’s dystopic view of the “unnatural” world, that turns out to mean almost everything.

That a newspaper would go to a doctor with no demonstrable expertise in toxicology for an article on toxins is bad enough; but to go to a doctor who has taken such controversial positions on mainstream medicine and give him a soapbox to lecture the public (and then direct them to his website where they can buy his products) is dumbfounding. If this is journalism, it’s toxic to readers.