ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross has been a busy man. Yesterday he presented ACSH’s position paper on the mentholation of cigarettes to an FDA panel considering a ban on the products. He also had an op-ed in Forbes.com on how the U.S. health care system seems to be moving toward putting cost before quality in a way recently abandoned by the British government’s drug rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Dr. Ross writes:
[I]t appears that the U.S. health system is on its way to British-style rationing. This shift in policy will bring with it the injustices and poor outcomes that have long been characteristic of Britain's National Health Service. All this has been insidiously infiltrating our health are system even before the new health reform law takes effect, which will add another layer of cost-cutting based on rationing—although no one will use that term.
ACSH’s scientific analyses were also cited twice in the media this week. While discussing the New York City Department of Health’s recent anti-soup ads warning consumers to watch their salt consumption, Walter Olson writes in the Cato Institute’s blog Cato @ Liberty that he heard via ACSH of “a new Harvard study finding that Americans’ intake of salt is almost exactly the same as it was 50 years ago; it also seems that international studies find that people in other countries tend to pursue and attain very similar levels of salt intake.”
Becky Fenger of SonoranNews.com also referenced ACSH to counter the myths linking high fructose corn syrup to increased obesity rates. “In a bulletin from the American Council on Science and Health, we learn that, finally, experts have come to the realization that HFCS is nutritionally equivalent to ordinary sugar.
