1. NPR used us to fact check the claims of a California judge who declared that coffee must come with a cancer warning - because the beans are roasted and IARC has declared everything a carcinogen. Various regional NPR sites also carried us. The links are at the bottom.
No one really pays attention to these warning labels in California by now - IARC has also declared bacon, tea and toast, plus the frying pan for the egg (so basically of breakfast) a carcinogen - but it's the trial lawyers who are behind this. In the 1970s, the litigation group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) first tried to go after coffee because it's a giant industry and could offer a huge settlement, by claiming it causes breast cancer. But we tore them to shreds.
We will save breakfast once again. If you want to help, sign our petition to get trial lawyer associations to stop undermining science to line their pockets.
2. Reuters and U.S. News and World Report coverage of the appointment of Admiral Ronny Jackson, MD, to run Veterans Affairs linked to our "day in the life" of afternoon with Adm. Jackson at the White House, and the work that goes into keeping hundreds of people healthy. Now he gets to do the same thing for the nation's military veterans.
3. In Newsweek, Dr. Josh Bloom and co-author Henry Miller, MD take the government to task for botching the optics of the opioid epidemic. Because the issue is firmly political the government is looking for someone or something to blame, so they are laser-focused on doctors, pharmaceutical companies and casually treating actual pain patients like they are recreational junkies.
It's good that Newsweek, which houses loons like Kurt Eichenwald, is willing to publish real expertise, but they still 'Newsweek it up' and make it sound in the title their editors created that Donald Trump traveled back in time to personally micromanage what the CDC began to claim about the opioid issue during the Obama administration.
4. Dr. Jamie Wells went to Fordham University to give a presentation titled, “No M.D.? No Problem! The Many Ways to Impact Healthcare Without Practicing Medicine” to interested undergraduate students. The actual practice of medicine is only going to be more thankless as more government rules, and the cost bloat those bring, become more prevalent, so Dr. Wells discussed how else people could help the public.
5. Capital Research Center used our work for an investigation into Tides Foundation and their links to Russian money. We were sounding the alarm early on about how Russians were either overtly helping environmental groups or simply funding "useful idiots" who hate American science and technology. The best way to funnel the money without a trail is to use donor-advised funds. Sourcewatch, one of the political attack sites against scientists run by former Clinton attorney Lisa Graves, got $500,000 in a single "anonymous" donation in one year. Graves and her Center for Media and Democracy claim not to know where the money came from. We're not going to rest until she comes clean.
6. Does the human brain find a ‘quick and dirty fix’ to a new problem? Our neurons are wired in such a way that they do not allow us to become instantaneously proficient when learning a new task, and Livemint used our article in their work.
More links for us last week, but there are way too many to list or I will get carpal tunnel syndrome
