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"It's a prescription for panic."
Dr. William Casarella, chairman of the department of radiology at Emory University, on the idea of frequent total-body CAT scans for the general population. Casarella is one of many people who have undergone intrusive surgery to examine ambiguous but benign nodes in his body. (New York Times, May 27, 2002)

Is there a difference between objective reporting and "balanced" reporting?

Why do news reports sometimes suggest that men can lower their risk of prostate cancer with changes in behavior, such as diet modification or changing the frequency of sexual activity?

Caveat Emptor. Consumers and journalists beware Anti-biotechnology activists engaged in a week of "direct action" at Starbucks Coffee shops this week aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again.

The National Council Against Health Fraud, Inc. (NCAHF) has concluded that policies prescribed in the report issued March 25th by the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) would lead to widespread adoption of unproven, disproven, and irrational methods and would cost the American public billions of dollars and thousands of human lives.
The 1910 Flexner Report set the standards for medical education. The WHCCAMP report does the exact opposite by outlining the agenda for establishing quackery.

The arrival of Earth Day brought a discussion of how to feed the poor. Feeding the hungry has been added to the Earth Day agenda, but the anti-technology rhetoric of past Earth Days, when the poor were forgotten, cannot easily be reconciled with this newly discovered concern.

A March 15th article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "In Europe, Prescription-Drug Ads Are Banned and Health Costs Lower" suggests that prescription drug advertising is the reason for high health care costs. With talk of the European Union easing its ban on direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies, many consumer groups and European officials fear that increased spending on advertising will result in higher prices on prescription drugs, squeezing already tight healthcare budgets. However, a basic economics lesson would teach them that such worries are unfounded.

Compelling scientific evidence shows that cholesterol-lowering drug therapy can reduce the risk of heart attacks by about 30 percent, according to a new report released by scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).

Yesterday's news that an American citizen had been charged with plotting with al Qaeda to obtain a "dirty nuke" is understandably causing increased anxiety in our already skittish nation. Before we start handing out radiation pills to everyone, however, we need to take a careful look at the real risks we face, and how to counter them.

Flawed government regulation discourages innovation and delays lifesaving products. Yet as the nation's population ages, Americans are becoming more dependent on medical progress to provide innovative treatments for diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and stroke to cancer.
A chilling example of this tension is the delay of an injectable antibiotic called Tigecycline for infections caused by "resistant pathogens" bacteria that are immune to standard antibiotics.

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal strongly condemned the Brooklyn Museum of Art recently when that august institution decided to devote a large exhibition space to the art of the Star Wars films. The Journal saw the exhibit as evidence of the decline of civilization while the Times was aghast at the crass commercialization of art. I loved it, and I'd argue that Star Wars movies are more relevant to the real world than they might at first appear.

If anyone doubts the power of letter writing: Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with a cake manufacturer because of my letter (below).
If you would like to take ten minutes and send an "ez-letter" on a smoking issue, go to www.smokefree.org and choose your letter.
Joe

Joe Cherner 375 South End Avenue New York, NY 10280

On that day, the American Heart Association (AHA) went on record (in the journal Circulation) saying that every person in the United States, starting at age twenty, should be regularly evaluated for the risk of having a heart attack or stroke.
Why is the proclamation important?

Where would you expect to hear that paying less and getting more is a bad thing? Only in the often-bizarre world of "public-health" activism.
Yes, according to NANA (the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity), fast-food vendors are robbing you blind by giving you more for less. You can read their report about the cost and calories found in various fast foods at their parent organization's website (http://www.cspinet.org/new/waistline_061802.html).
Among the horrifying findings:

"[CSPI] has just declared that all that cheese and meaty topping should have only a cameo appearance in a meal, not a starring role. The 'good news' is that they strongly endorse pizza with little or no cheese and lots of vegetables instead of sausage or pepperoni. Isn't that called 'salad'?"
Holly Love, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (brought to our attention by http://www.ConsumerFreedom.com ). Also see ACSH's press release on CSPI's pizza report.

The universal advice that has made guzzling water a national pastime is more urban myth than medical dogma and appears to lack scientific proof..."I have found no scientific proof that absolutely every person must 'drink at least eight glasses of water a day'."
Heinz Valtin, M.D., in an August 8 press release from Dartmouth Medical School.
See the letter ACSH's Ruth Kava wrote to the Wall Street Journal in May and an article she wrote for Priorities last year about the "eight glasses a day" myth.

While AIDS is the deadliest sexually-transmitted disease, we easily forget how much more widespread other STDs are. Today, there are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, roughly one out of every 345 people. It has rightly gained mass media attention and come to dominate sex education materials. Let's take a look at the numbers on some other scourges, though:
65 million, or 1 out of every 4 people: The number of people living with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) in the United States.

It's not every day that one of our projects here at the American Council on Science and Health moves people to write poetry. Well, actually, we've posted some ACSH-themed poetry, but rarely has anyone outside the organization written poetry about us, but now the Heartland Institute has.

There have been several reports lately about the odd, non-health-related projects that all that settlement money extracted from the tobacco companies went to, such as bridges, sprinkler systems, and even subsidies to tobacco farmers.

Bioterrorism: How Great Are the Risks?
Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan
Remarks Delivered at Debate with Richard Preston, Author of The Demon in the Freezer.
Sponsored by the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation
Thursday, November l4, 2002, at the City University of New York

All right, despite their protectionist laws, ludicrous theories about literature, and surrender-prone combat style, even the French occasionally get something right, and what better time to honor them than now, with Bastille Day upon us (even if the Revolution was a tragically misguided eruption of mass murder that threatened the foundations of civilization)?

Someday, I'm sure, it will become common knowledge that a health scare can be physically baseless yet cause real anxiety. People will learn to resist the urge to find a scapegoat for whatever illnesses happen to exist in the population (including symptoms induced by anxiety itself).

America's food supply is among the safest and most abundant in the world, thanks in part to a variety of technologies used to safeguard it. Nonetheless, in the last decade or so there has been an increasingly vocal minority that claims our foods are simply not as healthful or nutritious as they used to be. One of their targets is milk.
The Value of Pasteurization

Scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) find no compelling evidence that acrylamide, when consumed in foods such as French fries and bread, poses a risk of human cancer. Their conclusions are presented today in a report on acrylamide in food and its relation to human health: "Acrylamide in Food: Is It a Real Threat to Public Health?"

A recently-published study (New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 21) describes a new vaccine that can prevent persistent infection from a virus HPV, the human papillomavirus known to be a causative factor in about one-half of all cases of cervical cancer. This is a major breakthrough, for the fight against cervical cancer and, more broadly, for the burgeoning field of pharmaceutical products that may be useful in preventing human cancer.
Cervical Cancer