f ever there was an example of what’s wrong with the intersection of government and science, the Environmental Protection Agency’s 20-year campaign to scare the public about dioxin is certainly a leading candidate.

The EPA slammed into a bureaucratic wall this week when a National Academy of Sciences panel told the agency to take its dioxin report back to the drawing board. But the NAS’ rejection of the EPA report was handled with kid gloves -- permitting the agency to save face by allowing the dioxin scare to continue indefinitely.

“EPA assessment of dioxin understates uncertainty about health risks and may overstate human cancer risk,” was the headline of the NAS’ media release announcing (and summarizing) its review of the EPA’s latest dioxin scaremongering.

The NAS said the evidence that dioxin caused cancer in humans was “not strong” and that risk estimates had to be imagined through use of mathematical models. Despite the acknowledged absence of evidence linking dioxin with cancer in humans, the NAS panel bizarrely agreed that dioxin was “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

It’s the sort of 2-plus-2-equals-five conclusion that only connoisseurs of regulatory bureaucracy can fully appreciate.

The EPA issued in 2003 a draft report on dioxin alleging that the substance was 10 times more carcinogenic than the agency previously claimed -- and some dioxin hysterics had already been calling it the “most toxic manmade chemical” for which there was “no safe exposure.”

Read the rest at Fox News.