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This year has seen whooping cough outbreaks in New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere. Whooping cough is a serious disease that, in the past, killed many children and caused considerable suffering for many others. A program of immunization had just about eliminated whooping cough in the United States, but this year the disease is making a comeback: the number of reported cases has greatly exceeded those reported in recent years, a scary reminder of another era.

The July 1 Health Journal article "Getting Screened for Colon Cancer Isn't Just for the 50-and-Over Set" by Tara Parker-Pope was important. Colorectal cancer is both a major cancer killer and largely preventable with appropriate screening. Deciding who should and should not be screened is crucial, as it would be prohibitively expensive to screen everyone over age 40, instead of the currently recommended age cut-off of 50.

Re: "Health groups' donor ties questioned":
In light of the distortions promoted by the anti-consumer-choice, left-wing funded, advocacy group, Center For The Science in the Public Interest, below are some facts about the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). We are disappointed that your reporter did not contact us before publishing misleading information about our work.

A new publication by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century: What Modern Science Has Learned About Smoking Cessation, summarizes the spectrum of methods that have been proven to help smokers quit. The report also describes smoking cessation techniques currently in development and evaluates alternative methods that have been advocated as aids to smoking cessation.

The Jan. 20 article in the Health Journal, "Toxins in Breast Milk," conveys unscientific assumptions that will needlessly alarm many members of the public, especially women who plan to breast feed. The assertion that a study subject's body "carried 105 chemicals in measurable levels" is meaningless on its face. We all have thousands of "chemicals" in our bodies, both natural and synthetic. Why was the discussion centered on synthetic, to the exclusion of natural chemicals?

Your Dec. 8 articles "Health Officials Say Flu Shots Should Go to the Most Vulnerable" and "Lack of Vaccines Goes Beyond Flu Inoculations," dealing with the shortages in influenza (flu) vaccine as well as others, re-inforce two important points:

New York's mayor Mike Bloomberg has joined the list of public officials seeking to import drugs from Canada where even American-made pharmaceuticals are subject to price controls in a quest to provide cheaper drugs for New Yorkers. And not just for government employees, as other civic leaders have planned, but potentially for the millions treated within the huge NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation system.

Dear Dr. Whelan,
As a member of the ACSH Board of Science and Policy Advisors, I read with great interest the recent A Citizen's Guide to Terrorism and Response book. I found the publication filled with a great deal of good information, well thought out, and comprehensive. Although I think the publication did a good job addressing responses to WMDs, I also believe that the publication may have slighted other aspects of terrorism that might contribute significantly to instilling fear and creating significant health risks for Americans.

As the American Council on Science and Health prepares to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary with a celebratory dinner on Dec. 4, here's a quick look back at how things have changed over the years.
The world was different but not all that different in 1978, the year that a plucky pro-science non-profit opened its doors, headed by epidemiologist Dr. Elizabeth Whelan and dedicated to informing the public and opinion-makers about the real health science that is so often obscured by scare stories, activists, con artists, and quacks.

In its ninth survey of nutrition coverage by popular magazines, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) found that magazines directed towards homemaking and consumer interests once again provided the most reliable information. The survey, which covered magazines published in 2000, 2001, and 2002, ranked 16 of 20 magazines as "good" sources of nutrition information, two magazines were rated "fair," and two earned a rating of "poor."

There's something odd about the photo of the man PETA just declared the "sexiest vegetarian alive," as ACSH's Jeff Stier noticed. Twenty-one year-old Zachery from Yale is a vegan and thus probably thinks himself purer than thou for avoiding meat but what's that impure thing in his mouth...?
http://www.peta.org/feat/sexiestVegVote/

Economists told a Department of Health and Human Services panel on April 27 that allowing reimportation from Canada of pharmaceuticals so that they can be purchased by Americans at the low prices mandated by Canadian would hurt the research and development of new drugs in the lung run.

Research shows that while European consumers are getting drug prices up to a third below U.S. levels, their nations are paying a cost by losing research and development jobs to countries where better profits are being made. Price controls and slow approval processes are viewed by drug companies as hurting Europe's ability to compete with the U.S., and in the long term, the study shows, Europe will pay an economic price for lower drug prices.
Financial Times (London), April 28

Recently, I attended a meeting in Trinidad dealing with counterfeiting not of currency, which is what most of us associate with the word "counterfeit." This conference dealt with counterfeit drugs fake pharmaceuticals and I was one of the speakers. I was supposed to speak about "consumer aspects" of drug counterfeiting, but in truth I spoke mainly about the wild and wooly world of the Internet, and its relationship with drugs real, counterfeit, and in-between.

Yesterday, I received a cloning update newsletter that contained the title "Hollywood clunker spreads fear and misconception." At first, I was confused as to how a film as God-awful as the new sci-fi film Godsend could spread anything other than contempt among those who paid to sit through it. But after exploring the movie's elaborate marketing, the confusion was easier to understand. A website for the Godsend Institute, which looks as real as Ebay, offers that fictional organization's cloning services.

America's technological prowess and enviable high standard of living are now under unprecedented assault by an array of self-appointed "consumer advocates" who claim our food, water, air, and consumer products are making us sick.

The brain hungers to place things in simple categories: good for you, bad for you...safe, risky. But the stomach hungers for French fries, salmon, meat substitutes, and other things that have been hastily labeled "bad" by activists, so the brain has some work to do: putting the activists' warnings (about food and other things) in context, weighing those tiny or imagined risks against other risks from everyday life. Ten lessons for the discriminating risk-assessor:

The juxtaposition of two recent items in the New York Times was striking.
First, there was the Sunday, June 13th frontpage photo of Presidential candidate John Kerry, helmetless, riding a motorcycle (accompanying the article "Behind the Scenes, a Restless and Relentless Kerry").

For the past four or five years a clarion call to eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains has been heard throughout the U. S. Often it is coupled with "and avoid saturated fat" or "avoid dairy and meat because of saturated fat." All versions of the call, one way or another, are urging us to reduce meat and milk products in our diets. No doubt one purpose of the fruit-and-vegetable cry is to help deal with the obesity epidemic, a very worthy objective, but it doesn't seem to be working. Americans are reported to be getting fatter all the time.

It's amazing how many people feel comfortable blaming the food industry for the obesity epidemic in the United States. Less surprising is that having blamed industry, people seek to regulate what types of food can be marketed toward children. But refusal to take personal responsibility for eating misleads us into thinking that Americans are fat because of junk food. It also perpetuates the nonsensical claim that food can be separated into two categories: good and bad.

ACSH's Whelan v. CSPI's Wootan over vending machines on CNBC

"I cannot explain to my mother any longer why she should pay twice or two-thirds more than what is paid in Canada and Mexico. I'm switching my position." United States Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.), March 11th, 2004.
Dear Sen. Lott:
It pains me to hear that your concern for your aged mom has caused some confusion on your part about the risks and benefits of importing drugs from Canada and elsewhere. You suggest that your inability to explain your earlier position to your aged mother is justification for your change in position

An April 16, 2004 article by Arnold Kling on regulation notes an article from Reason magazine by ACSH's Todd Seavey:

An August 31, 1992 National Review piece by Peter Samuel was reprinted by http://nationalreview.com on June 10, 2004 and contains the following ACSH reference: