How do we all feel about chemicals? There seems to be this huge movement these days where people avoid chemicals because they sound scary.

Some chemicals actually are scary. For instance, around 3500 people die in US every year as a direct result of exposure to oxidane. About 20% of those are children under the age of 14. That's pretty bad, right? Should we regulate oxidane? Surely something should be done about something so dangerous.

Oxidane is of course another name for water. It baffles me when people read a chemical name and immediately think it's bad, particularly when accompanied by alarmist statistics. Why won't people do even the simplest research to determine whether something really is harmful?