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Perhaps Dan Mitchell was watching ACSH's Jeff Stier on yesterday s CNBC segment covering the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) threat to sue McDonalds over Happy Meal toys when he observed that CSPI s tactics were a bit much in Slate's The Big Money.
According to Stephen Gardner, CSPI s litigation director, McDonald s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children.

The FDA seems poised to approve a new morning-after pill, one which is effective for up to five days after unprotected sex, two days longer than the currently available Plan B. French drugmaker HRA Pharma has asked permission to sell Ella in the US, the brand name for the chemical ulipristal.

Upon discovering that the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the foremost expert organization on the causes of cancer, posted the recently released “President’s Cancer Panel” report on their website, ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan expressed her discontent in a letter:

An FDA advisory panel has unanimously rejected Boehringer Ingelheim s application for flibanserin, a failed anti-depressant drug they proposed to use as a treatment for reduced sexual desire in women. The panel argued that the research was not robust enough to justify the risks but encouraged the company to further their research efforts.

ACSH trustees Dr. Henry I. Miller, a Hoover Institution fellow, and James E. Enstrom, a professor at UCLA School of Public Health, contributed an op-ed yesterday in Forbes.com condemning California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations on diesel trucks and other vehicles, which are said to emit a form of air pollution known as diesel particulate matter.

It’s the 12th annual Junk Science Week in Canada, and the Financial Post is calling for science, not politics, to determine the merit behind salt reduction policies. Dr. David McCarron, visiting professor at the University of California, Davis and executive director of Shaping America’s Youth, writes that human physiology already dictates our salt intake:

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a stakeholders phone conference announcing a draft document on the toxicology of formaldehyde inhalation and exposure.

This Friday, data from 4,000 patients across 11 failed Alzheimer s drug clinical trials will be publicly available for a group of major pharmaceutical companies who have agreed to collaborate and pool information in order to better understand how the disease progresses.

ACSH staffers were pleased to learn the FDA has approved a new HIV combination assay that allows earlier detection of HIV and AIDS. Current HIV tests have a “window period” of two to eight weeks during which time a newly-infected person can test negative for the disease. Abbot Laboratories’ new test cuts seven to 20 days from that window period.

ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan lost a night of sleep on Friday reading Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice (Simon & Schuster, 2009), which depicts the story of a Harvard professor who at age 50 is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. After reading such a book, Dr. Whelan says, you cannot help but become interested in Alzheimer’s research, which happened to have made the front page of Saturday’s New York Times.

If you ask 100 people what a vitamin is, at least 100 of them will get it wrong. They will have some vague ideas: everyone should take them, they are derived from natural sources and the more you take, the healthier you will be. All of this is wrong.

The U.S. Apple Association (USApple), a national trade association representing all divisions of the apple industry, is advising Alzheimer’s patients to drink one, 8-ounce glass of apple juice per day in order to improve their mood and behavior. According to a clinical trial of 21 Alzheimer patients between the ages of 72 to 93, an intake of two, 4-ounce servings of apple juice daily for one month improved anxiety, apathy, agitation, depression and delusions.

Duff Wilson of the New York Times presents new CDC data indicating that the teenage smoking rate has not declined fast enough, failing to reach the goal of 16 percent by 2010. Currently, high school students make up approximately 20 percent of smokers.

ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross greeted staff this morning with a spirited Buon giorno! upon his return from the July 2-7 Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) conference series in Turin, Italy during which ACSH hosted a presentation on Reducing the toll of smoking-related disease and death: the case for tobacco harm reduction. The three keynote speakers included Karl-Olov Fagerstrom, Karl Erik Lund, and Lars Ramstrom world-renowned science and policy experts on tobacco and nicotine.

Yesterday we commented on Mayor Michael Bloomberg s endorsement of a plan to ban smoking in parks and beaches based in part on a New York City-funded study in 2009 claiming that 57 percent of non-smoking New York City adults, compared to 45 percent nationally, tested positive for the presence of cotinine, a marker for nicotine exposure.
With due diligence, ACSH s Jeff Stier found the original publication of the cited study which states:

ACSH’s Jeff Stier testified today at the Food and Drug Administration's Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC), which began meeting yesterday in Gaithersburg, Md. At the conference, TPSAC is discussing the possibility of proscribing the use of menthol in cigarettes. His testimony was based on ACSH’s position paper on mentholated cigarettes.

The AP reports that a quarter of the H1N1 vaccines produced in the US will be thrown away. Some believe that the World Health Organization may have overblown the issue.

Doctors working for the WTC Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program are investigating the relationship between 9/11 rescue and recovery work and thyroid cancer. In a February 2009 court report, 51 cases of the cancer were claimed among the 10,000 cops, firefighters, hard hats and other plaintiffs suing the city.

ACSH staffers are amazed at the plethora of baseless scares making the news this week. Perhaps, as ACSH’s Jeff Stier predicts, this silly scare season is associated with activist rallying to promote legislation on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA reform), including an effort by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to enact a BPA ban — or attach such a ban to the Food Safety and Modernization Act, now under consideration in the Senate, after languishing there for over a year after House passage.

Slate.com ran a story addressing the controversy over raw (unpasteurized) milk consumption, which public health officials have linked to 85 infectious disease outbreaks from 1998-2008. Advocates for raw milk argue, however, that “nature’s perfect food” tastes better and that public health concerns are overblown. Raw milk is banned in some states, but those that allow it impose strict regulations on the farms that produce it.

During her confirmation hearings yesterday, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was questioned by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on an issue near and dear to ACSH: Does the U.S. government have the authority to tell the American public what they can and cannot eat?
Kagan responded, The question of whether it s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it s constitutional.
Courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they re senseless, continued Kagan.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) gets another red mark from ACSH for attempting to have three of the most commonly used food dyes banned by the Food and Drug Administration. CSPI claims that these dyes contain carcinogens and cause behavioral problems in children. Notably, the three dyes Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 are often found in sugary foods such as cereals, fruit drinks, and candy.

Alarm over new food technologies is increasing in the EU as the European Parliament asked for a ban against the sale of foods from cloned animals and their offspring last Wednesday.

ACSH has received a number of responses to our coverage of CNN s Dr. Sanjay Gupta s claims that the food additives used in McDonald s Chicken McNuggets in China pose serious health threats.
For instance, ACSH trustee, Hoover Institution fellow, and former FDA official Dr. Henry Miller reminded us that Dr. Gupta was the Obama administration s first nominee for surgeon general, despite his talent for popularizing such pseudoscience claims.

Genzyme and Isis Pharmaceuticals have developed a new cholesterol-lowering drug, Mipomersen, which has demonstrated substantial efficacy in Phase III clinical trials but may cause liver problems in 20 percent of patients. Mipomersen is targeted towards patients with a genetic predisposition to elevated blood cholesterol levels (familial