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ACSH staffers would like to give two thumbs down to the Cleveland City Council for recently passing some “extraordinary” public health bills. The first one will ban the use of trans fat in prepared foods in Cleveland restaurants, while the second is an outdoor smoking ban. Residents will no longer be able to light up in city-owned public parks, recreation areas, swimming pools, picnic shelters, public squares and some malls.

Falls are the leading cause of injury among people over the age of 65, and according to the CDC, it affects one in three adults each year. Jack Mills, a continuous quality improvement specialist for the Lake County Health Department’s Population Health Services, emphasizes that falls have “really a life-altering and quality-of-life-altering impact on older people,” which is why the Lake County Health Department established a Falls Prevention Task Force to disseminate prevention and awareness pamphlets to seniors.

As an unscientific follow-up to last week’s interminable “toxic sugar” story is another chemophobic rant from The New York Times. This time it’s about chemicals involved in the hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking) process used to release natural gas from shale deposits deep underground.

In February, ACSH commended the efforts of North America’s only “safe injection site” — Insite — for successfully reducing the number of new HIV infections in Vancouver, B.C. by 52 percent since 1996. Now a new study published in The Lancet shows that Insite is also contributing another form of harm reduction: decreasing the number of deaths from drug overdoses.

The use of mammograms has decreased ever since the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) made a controversial recommendation in 2009 advising women in their 40s to wait until age 50 to get routine mammography screenings, and then only every two years.

In a victory for embryonic stem cell (ESC) researchers, a U.S. appeals court has ruled that the Obama administration may continue to federally fund ESC studies using embryos that would otherwise be discarded. The story began in late August when U.S. District Judge Royce Lambeth ruled in favor of two adult stem cell scientists who sued the NIH, arguing that federal funding of ESC research would violate U.S.

The FDA has just approved a new diagnostic test that will expedite the time needed to confirm a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection. Whereas current MRSA tests take up to 48 hours to generate results, the BD GeneOhm StaphSR test, developed by BD Diagnostics, can detect MRSA within five hours of culturing a sample.

In 2007, a large 33.5-million-dollar trial, known as the COURAGE trial, found that percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) offered fewer benefits over drug therapy for the treatment of stable heart disease.

A potential ban on menthol cigarettes got some momentum, based upon three studies published in the latest edition of The American Journal of Public Health.

A new study published in The Lancet finds that hydroxyurea, a cancer drug which has been used used to treat sickle cell disease in adults and adolescents since 1995, is also safe and effective for infants. Researchers — part of a team led by Dr. Winifred Wang of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis — studied 193 infants and toddlers, ages 8 to 19 months, at 14 U.S.

Is there a link between smoking and blindness? If you weren’t aware that there is, it’s probably for lack of a national awareness campaign. Smoking is indeed causally associated with a number of visually impairing eye diseases, including cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, but a recently released international study in the journal Optometry found that most people simply aren’t aware of the risk.

Is your doctor’s necktie transmitting resistant bacteria to your hospitalized loved-one? Quite possibly. The New York Legislature is currently considering a bill that would prohibit all health care professionals from wearing neckties or jewelry, which have long been known to carry bacteria.

Another misguided but bombastic effort ostensibly about the fight against childhood obesity comes in the form of a letter to McDonald’s Corp that asks the franchise to stop marketing “junk food” to kids, and, specifically, to retire Ronald McDonald. The letter, signed by “more than 550 health professionals and organizations,” is being run as a full-page ad in six metropolitan newspapers in the U.S.

The number of urban and suburban emergency room shut-downs has increased by 27 percent between 1990 and 2009, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And even though you think you may be safe because the ER nearest you is still operating, think again: Closures of nearby ERs will undoubtedly affect your own quality of health care.

Just as it's not advisable to purchase your prescription medications online, it's probably not a good idea to find your drug highs there either. Published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis, Dr.

Physicians — and consumers — should be aware of particular Ayurvedic medicine products that have been associated with two recent New York City cases of lead poisoning in adults. This report from the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene offers a full advisory in regard to Pregnita, Vasant Kusumakar Ras with Gold and Pearl and Mahashakti Rasayan.

On his tobacco blog, Tobaccoanalysis.com, ACSH scientific advisor Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, addresses the misleading claims of a recent article published in Tobacco Control, in which the authors reprimand the tobacco industry for not doing enough to lower the levels of tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs) in cigarettes over the years.

Though today’s New York weather may not look it, spring is in the air and summer is fast approaching. For many, this means that it’s time for spring cleaning. However, as is pointed out in a USA Today article, this season is also a time when many people sustain preventable injuries during their cleaning. For instance, the U.S.

There is a reliable means of reducing the risk of permanent disability from a stroke, though many stroke victims may not act quickly enough to receive it. A clot-dissolving drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) has been approved by the FDA since 1996, but it is used by only a very small percentage of stroke victims, most likely because it must be administered within a few hours of stroke onset in order to be effective.

We were shocked and disappointed to read that an average 40 percent of pregnancies in our country are unwanted or unexpected. Based on a 2006 state-by-state pregnancy intention survey — the first of its kind ever conducted — out of 86,000 women who gave birth and 9,000 who had an abortion, the study found that the highest rates of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies occurred in the South, Southwest and in states with large urban populations.

Although some version of the intrauterine device (IUD) has been available for female contraception since the 1970s, side effects both large and small prevented most women from considering it a valid option. However, advances in design and usage have resulted in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists formal endorsement of the device for all healthy adult women.

Ever since the FDA finally approved silicone gel breast implants in 2006, the procedure has grown in popularity; nearly 400,000 breast enlargement or reconstruction procedures were performed in the U.S. in 2010 alone. While confirming that silicone gel-filled breast implants are safe and effective when used as intended, the FDA emphasized that women should fully understand the risks prior to considering silicone gel-filled breast implants for breast augmentation or reconstruction.

Media coverage of the disastrous E. coli outbreak in Europe has become a source of both anxiety and relief for Americans: In Germany, nearly 3,000 have fallen ill thus far — 700 with acute kidney failure — and 27 have died, but there’s been no sign that this highly virulent form of E. coli has caused any illness in the U.S.

Atrazine, the herbicide most responsible for the well being of the cornfields across so much of the U.S. countryside, has once again been deemed a non-threat to human health. Most recently, the respected ongoing Agricultural Health Study (AHS) found no link between exposure to atrazine and overall cancer risk.

As a heat wave sweeps over New York City and much of the rest of the country, we’d be remiss if we didn’t pass on a recommendation from New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
First of all, it’s important to remember that those at increased risk for hospitalization and death from heat stroke include adults ages 65 and older, as well as patients with cardiovascular disease, psychiatric illness (often involving substance abuse), diabetes, or respiratory illness. Poorer neighborhoods also see a higher rate of heat-related illness and death.