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For the past fifty years -- dating back to the first national "carcinogen" scare, over cranberries during Thanksgiving 1959 -- Americans have been told that there are cancer causing agents in food, water, air, and various consumer products like paper towels, plastic toys, medical equipment -- even typewriter correction fluid.

Environmental groups are likely to tout today's announcement that DuPont settled for more than $10 million with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the chemical compound perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The EPA alleged that Dupont failed to meet certain legislatively mandated reporting requirements with regard to PFOA, which is a byproduct of the process used in manufacturing Teflon.

Americans have a unique aversion to risk -- particularly when it comes to pharmaceuticals and medical treatment. We want all the benefits of modern medical technology, but many of us won't tolerate any of the risks associated with them. We've come to expect absolute safety as well as assurances of efficacy: that is, we want an ironclad guarantee that the drug or procedure works as expected, with no serious downsides.

We tried to respectfully petition the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revisit their outmoded methods of assigning carcinogen risk to various chemicals in the environment, and their response, despite laws mandating their response within a set time period, was essentially: "Your message is very important to us -- please call back later."
How can a federal agency have no one minding the store, you say? That's what we want to know.

The following editorial appeared on SperoForum.com.
As 2005 draws to a close, one of the most debated health issues of the year, drug importation to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, remains in limbo.

An article by James Taylor in Environment News on January 1, 2006, concerning anti-pesticide regulations, notes ACSH's suit against the EPA and quotes Dr. Gilbert Ross:
Ironically, the Washington proposal followed a call by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) for the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to eliminate "junk science" from the processes by which it determines whether a particular chemical is harmful to humans.

A December 29, 2005 article by John Johnston quotes the ACSH publication What's the Story? The Role of Milk in Your Diet and ACSH nutrition director Dr. Ruth Kava:

A letter in the December 2, 2005 Washington Times by American Heart Association's Aaron Tallent reacts to a column by ACSH's Dr. Whelan:
Dr. Elizabeth Whelan made many strong points in her Monday Commentary column, "Fast food tells all," regarding the decision of McDonald's to print nutritional information about its products on the wrappers.

A November 20, 2005 article by Chresten Anderson quotes an op-ed by Brad Rodu and ACSH's Jeff Stier, which made the point that it is specifically the tar from smoking that accounts for almost all tobacco-related health problems, not nicotine (which can be more safely acquired by chewing, for those who cannot beat nicotine altogether):

An article by Sara Solovitch in the December 19, 2005 Los Angeles Times on California's lawsuit against foods containing acrylamide included a quote from ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan -- and followed it with what may the public health overstatement of the year:

Skepticism is hard. As a recent best-selling book noted, doubletalk is a pervasive part of an attention-driven, media-dominated economy. But we can't just choose to doubt everything all the time, or we'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning for fear of the floorboards inexplicably collapsing. So we each come up with our little rubrics for deciding what to discount.

A new report from Norway, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, presents stark new data on the lethal effects of cigarettes. The Norwegian scientists accumulated smoking and mortality data from almost 50,000 people over the course of twenty-five years -- the largest study ever to include women, who comprised half of the study subjects. The subjects were in the forty- to seventy-year age range.

“It is wise to be prepared for the small but real possibility...of such a pandemic.”—Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, ACSH
March 15, 2006 -- New York, New York. The toll in human lives from avian influenza (or “bird flu”) is so far relatively small, and a global pandemic probably will not occur -- but the potential consequences of such a pandemic are so devastating that preparations are nonetheless a high priority.

A March 23, 2006 article by Jill Gardiner described reactions to a federal report saying New York has the nation's dirtiest air, including a reaction from ACSH's Jeff Stier:
A spokesman for the American Council on Science and Health, Jeff Stier, said that while exposure to high levels of toxic chemicals over a long period of time was something to worry about, it is not credible to suggest that the level of those toxins in the air is cancer-causing.

The potential for an avian flu pandemic is something we're constantly asked about at the American Council on Science and Health. It doesn't help that headlines constantly blare about "deadly" outbreaks in Asia and Europe without troubling to clarify whether the outbreaks are deadly to humans or birds. Still, unlike so many health scare stories we analyze, bird flu is not just hype but a real potential threat -- the tricky part is determining how big that potential is.

A May 1, 2006 article on ConsumerAffairs.com quotes ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan reacting to the Institute of Medicine report that noted that facemasks would offer little protection in an avian flu outbreak:

This piece appeared on April 28, 2006 on the site MedicalProgressToday.com.

New York, New York, May 2006 Summer means more outdoor sports, more traveling, barbeques and picnics galore. Summer can also bring insect bites, boating and swimming accidents, and an increased risk of food poisoning but it doesn t have to. Physicians and scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) released an updated list of Health and Safety Tips for Your Summer Vacation that will help people avoid the negative aspects of summer fun and travel.

This piece appeared on NationalReview.com.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Thursday that it has agreed to let General Electric delay the dredging of the Hudson River -- which the agency had ordered several years ago in order to further lower the trace levels there of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The delay would allow the company to complete work on a "sediment processing facility" by 2007.

This article appeared July 12, 2006 on the website of the Business & Media Institute:
Dr. Sylvester Graham -- who was born in 1794 and died in 1851 -- has been re-incarnated. His new name is Michael Jacobson, founder and director of the Washington-based "food police," operating under the name the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

This article appeared in the June 26, 2006 New York Sun:
In the latest episode in New York City's war against obesity, we have a standoff between Big Government and Big Macs.

New York City has hundreds of bustling fast-food outlets, but if one leading politician has his way, there may soon be fewer of them on the block. Worried by soaring levels of obesity and the health problems that go with it, the city council's health committee chairman says the time has come to challenge the rampant growth of fast-food chains.
Will it work? If it were that simple, people would not be fat in the first place.

News has just broken of a man, apparently a drummer in a band, contracting inhalation anthrax, not from a terror attack (as happened in 2001 shortly after 9/11) but from touching an animal hide, or so initial reports suggest.
For more information on anthrax, from the mundane encounters to nightmare scenarios, please read ACSH's full report on the topic, Anthrax: What You Need to Know.

Talk about recycling! Not only do we recycle our bottles, paper, and aluminum foil, we're also poised to recycle our health scares. Like the mythical snake that swallows its own tail, fear of benzene has come around again, since it has been found in very tiny amounts (we're talking parts per billion) in some soft drinks.
Imperiled Perrier Parallels

A February 8, 2006 article by Temba Nolutshungu denounces regulations that keep biotech crops from hungry Africans, and ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is mentioned: