No argument that this chemical is surely much less harmful than arsenic and that america is less polluted than Bangladesh.

And in practice it probably doesn't make sense for the individual in america to worry too much. There aren't really any places on earth you wouldn't have an effect from less dangerous/harder to diagnose chemicals.

But as a society we should still investigate it. A lot of small things summed together can add to something large.

For instance, why has fertility dropped so much? No one knows. Why are lab animals getting fatter? We don't know that either.

Slow burns are harder to sort out, but they can certainly exist.

If it were just one chemical we should be concerned about your argument would be valid. However, we're in contact with thousands of compounds every day that never had long term safety testing done. Not to mention potential effects caused by the interactions of the different chemicals.

> If it turns a 0.1% chance of cancer into a 0.12% chance of cancer, I think it's a waste of time to worry about it.

That's 60k cases of cancer in the US. Not worth worrying about on a personal level, perhaps, but on a public policy one?

To put this number into perspective, there are roughly ~30k automobile related fatalities in the US each year.

HN tends to glorify self-driving vehicles because they might put a dent into that statistic. I wonder why that concern doesn't apply to drinking water.

In fairness, the cancer odds were lifetime. So would would have to divide that hypothetixal by 80 or so to compare to annual car deaths: 750

Sure, but the OP was talking about personal “fear” not public policy. I absolutely agree these should be investigated for public policy purposes because of tve potential aggregate effect. But don’t worry about it.