The first issue of Priorities: For Long Life and Good Health was published in l988, with a mandate to fill an information gap left by popular health magazines specifically, to assist consumers in distinguishing between real health risks and phantom ones. For the last 12 years, Priorities/PfH accomplished this with articles exposing how the health risks of pesticides, chemicals at trace levels in the environment, and commercially processed or high-tech foods, for example, are overstated, as well as articles focusing on real health risks, such as those of tobacco use, passive smoking, and failure to use life-saving devices, like bicycle helmets, seat belts, and smoke detectors.
Soon, ACSH will take the next logical step in the evolution of its flagship publication: Priorities will become a totally online, interactive "magazine." Writings of Priorities in its new form on such subjects as lifestyles, nutrition, pharmaceuticals, and environmental chemicals and human health will be timelier than ever before. We expect that, from early 2002, several scientifically sound papers will be published per week in the Priorities section of ACSH's website (www.acsh.org). The appearance of Priorities will continue to be that of a quarterly, but publication of papers in each "issue" will not be at once but sequential.
Further, we will encourage input from readers through an expanded "ACSH/Priorities Forum." We hope that you will find such messages lively and informative and that you will contribute your knowledge and perspective to such exchanges.
On matters ranging from cigarette smoking to bioterrorism, from food safety to the latest environmental canard centering on a "cancer-causing agent," Priorities will "be there," with a commitment to ACSH's original goals: differentiating real health risks and purely hypothetical health risks, and supporting both regulations and consumer decisions that are based on sound science.
(From Priorities, Vol. 13, No. 4)