Topic: CNSNews.com
A May 10 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas took a page out of WorldNetDaily's notebook to make misleadingly alarmist claims about compact fluorescent lights. Focusing on the that WND's Joseph Farah did -- that of the Brandi Bridges family -- stating that "Bridges dropped a fluorescent bulb in her daughter's room and it shattered, leaving potentially unsafe levels of mercury inside the rug. At the suggestions of the state's Department of Environmental Protection, she now has to pay $2,000 for a professional environmental clean up. Her seven-year-old daughter sleeps in the family room, as her room is sealed off by plastic."
But like Farah, Lucas descends into scaremongering and ignored information showing that the Bridges case was overblown. Like Farah, Lucas fails to mention that, according to the newspaper article from which they both apparently took their claims about the Bridges case, another spokesman for Maine's Department of Environmental Protection points out that it "isn’t necessary to hire professionals at all” for a light bulb, and that the specialist who responded to Bridges’ broken bulb was trained to respond to chemical spills and to clean up such spills to "appropriate standards."
Lucas wrote that "In Bridges' case, the shattered glass couldn't be easily removed from the carpet and reached a level of 1,939 ng/m3 (monograms per cubic meter) in the single area. For her daughter's entire room, the levels in the air were well below 300, considered the threshold for safety." But the newspaper reported the rest of the story:
State Toxicologist Andrew Smith said it would be unlikely that a person could contract mercury poisoning from the levels of mercury found in Bridges’ daughter’s room.
“In this situation, my understanding, was this 1,900 was the sign reading right at the spot of the floor where the bulb broke,” said Smith. “While 1,900 was certainly considered an elevated reading of mercury vapor, it was a very localized level that I would not expect to result in any sign of mercury exposure.”
Lucas also failed to mention that, acccording to the newspaper, Bridges "spent roughly two to three hours a day over the past several weeks, talking on the phone and in person and contacting local papers to get the word out on what she believes are dangerous light bulbs." Was CNS one of the news outlets Bridges contacted in her media blitz?
