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The first is timing.
a. Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association, in a statement. "Our industry has used mercury-free versions of the two re-agents mentioned in the study, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, for several years.." Low-ball "several" and say it = 2, just to be cautious. Then they were Hg-free from 2007.
b. "However, the IATP told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that four plants in Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia still use "mercury-cell" technology that can lead to contamination.
"IATP's Ben Lilliston also told HealthDay that the Environmental Health findings were based on information gathered by the FDA in 2005."
What to make of that? I don't know, but a literal reading renders the conclusion quite possibly just a historical fact, not an on-going concern.
Oddly, the reporter adds, "The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common. The contamination occurs when mercury cells are used to produce caustic soda." The information is the background needed to understand Wallinga's closing statement. Howver, this is taken from Wallinga et al. 2005; it's not independently obtained information, it's drawn from the report they're citing--except that the report was for 2005, not 2009, and asserted what was sometimes the case in 2005. The reporter adds, in his (her?) own voice that it's still ongoing by using the present tense. Now, it may be that the reporter independently verified this, which is absolutely at odds with the industry spokesperson's statement. If so, that information would have been nice to see.
The second is logic:
"And in the second study, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a non-profit watchdog group, found that nearly one in three of 55 brand-name foods contained mercury. The chemical was found most commonly in HFCS-containing dairy products, dressings and condiments."
"And the group's own study, while not peer-reviewed, was based on products "bought off the shelf in the autumn of 2008," Lilliston added."
So can we conclude that the HCFS in these foods still contained Hg in 2008? No. The chemical was apparently found more often in HFCS-containing foods, but not only in such foods. Was the Hg distribution random? Was it based on something other than HFCS? Perhaps the IATP article contains this information; if so, Wallinga should have said so. Again, that would have been (and perhaps was) good science. As it is, we're tempted to say,
HFCS contained mercury in 2005.
Foods containing HFCS in 2008 contained also mercury.
therefore the mercury came from the HFCS.
It's called abductive reasoning, and it's not necessarily a valid inference.
What we're left with is uncertainty which too many will read as indicating certainty: "The bad news is that nobody knows whether or not their soda or snack food contains HFCS made from ingredients like caustic soda contaminated with mercury."
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