A recent story about the bizarre symptoms of policemen, who were exposed to street fentanyl, turned out to be anxiety attacks – not fentanyl poisoning. What happened? Yes, it's time for another Dreaded Chemistry Lesson From Hell!
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Food deserts are areas frequently in urban settings where it is difficult to find stores providing fresh foods, especially fruits and vegetables. Food deserts have long been thought to contribute to poor nutrition because the food people need is just not available. A study in JAMA Pediatrics suggests that this long-held thought may be a mirage.
I wrote the other day about a study from China on the effect of dietary salt on blood pressure. The study was unique in that it distinguished four regional Chinese cuisines. This got me thinking about whether salt use varies among American cuisines and regions. The standard narrative is that the salt in our heavily processed foods is a significant factor in the nearly 50% prevalence of high blood pressure—but then I ran across this study.
How are politicians similar to bacteria? ACSH advisor Dr. Henry Miller explains.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently came out in support of "regenerative" farming as a solution to climate change. There is little evidence to justify her advocacy.
Surgeons are frequently impatient, “never letting the skin get in the way of the problem.” One of my colleagues repeatedly asks God, "Please give me patience right away.” That seems to be the case for us that are not scientists; we often are not patient enough for the data to unfold; the data, in this case, some reliable findings on the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis associated with the COVID vaccinations.
Anti-vaping activists have put themselves in an awkward position. They want to demonize e-cigarettes because, they allege, nicotine poses a risk to teenagers. But they also want teenagers to use nicotine gums and patches to quit smoking. What sense does that make? None.
An excellent commencement address; after all, it is the season
Living with pain
“Because we live in the past when we are online, we will find ourselves fighting over the past.”
The downside of letting machines do our work.
Ferdinand the Bull’s real-life model, Civilón
Geomythology pairing our cultural myths with geologic findings
What will food be like in the future, more like Soylent Green or Impossible Burgers – Oreos may foretell our food future.
Woke words
We sure need a new pain medicine without the baggage of NSAIDs or the stigma of opioids. Johnson & Johnson thinks it might have an answer - a derivative of Tylenol without the associated liver toxicity. But does it treat pain? Not very well.
There is no question that health, fitness, and anti-aging issues dominate our culture and have risen to a cult level of obsession for millions of people who have turned the simple task of feeding and taking care of themselves into a religious obsession.
I like Marion Nestle, although I do not always agree with her point of view. She writes a food blog entitled Food Politics, and in her current article, it seems that the emphasis here is on politics rather than food.
A critically important paper in the journal Frontiers in Pain Medicine concludes that while the rationale for reducing opioid prescriptions to minimize overdose deaths was sound between 2006-2010, during the ensuing decade the opposite was true. Reducing opioid prescriptions during this time dramatically increased deaths and hospitalizations. In other words, what worked 15 years ago is an unmitigated disaster at this time.
In our somewhat academic household, “solving differential equations” was a euphemism for tackling a challenging intellectual problem with an uncertain outcome. Pinning down the health effects of air pollution exposure is one such problem.
Certainty and extremism
Will we ever know the origin of COVID-19?
What can the Talmud teach us about Twitter and Facebook?
And now, a moment with Hans Rosling.
If you find yourself wondering why the science press is afforded so little respect these days, maybe overhyped claims are contributing. Last week, various lay publications and press releases reported that posture significantly affects how fast the body absorbs medicine. The results were based on a new model to simulate drug dissolution in the human stomach. Sounds important and impressive, no? No. Read on.
Is the U.S. heading for even more trouble from drug overdose deaths? Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and ACSH advisor, says yes. Modelers have predicted that ODs will accelerate because of even stronger fentanyl analogs and also due to mixing drugs that should not be mixed. Anyone still blaming the overprescribing of opioid analgesics for our soaring deaths should read this.
Recently, Contrafect, an antibiotic biotech company developing a novel product for the treatment of severe staphylococcal infections, suffered a failure in its phase 3 trial. The trail was designed to show the superiority of its new drug over standard treatments. Why is it so hard to show that one antibiotic works better than another in a clinical trial?
Recent news reports have spurred concern that just touching fentanyl can be dangerous. Let's take a look at the chemistry behind this claim. Comedian Bill Maher recently attacked the fat-acceptance movement as a danger to public health, sparking ferocious criticism on social media. Sadly, few people recognized the most important point about Maher's commentary: he was right.
Climate change is real; we contribute to it. But warmer temperatures aren't driving unprecedented increases in the number of heart attacks we suffer.
Tracking cookies – those bite-size snippets of code that log your internet behavior – come in as many forms as recipes for chocolate chip cookies. They are ubiquitous on all commercial websites, but as it turns out they can often be found on governmental websites. How did that come to be? Part of Big Brother’s surveillance or could it be a quiet “smash and grab” by social media companies?
Based on data gathered by the CDC, in 2020, the rate of suicide in the US population was 13 per 100,000, far more frequent in men (21 per 100,000) than in women (5.4 per 100,000). Firearms were the most common means, again higher amongst men than women. For fifty years, identifying the individuals at risk for suicide has been no better than a coin flip. A new study looks at whether there are markers that can improve the ability to identify the group of individuals using guns to take their life.
What do Monkeypox, the opioid crisis, New Mexico fires, Kentucky flooding, and COVID-19 have in common? All have been declared public health emergencies. [1] So what exactly does a declaration of a public health emergency mean?
Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and the District of Columbia have Death with Dignity legislation. Arizona, Delaware, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Rhode Island all have active legislation under consideration. California and Vermont have amended legislation. All told, 74 million individuals live in states with Medical Aid in Dying and 87 million more in states considering this legislation. A new paper looks at who has availed themselves of these services.
Most of my dieting or weight-conscious friends rely on the bevy of artificial sweeteners on the market to aid their quest of finding “their svelte outer selves.” For example, we have saccharin, the oldest of the bunch, sucralose, aspartame, and stevia, available in rainbow-pastel-colored packets for the asking. Is one better than the other?
Pagination
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