Steve Milloy in his weekly Foxnews.com column, commenting on conflicting NCI mammography advice:
"What's a woman even her physician to make of this? Is this the National Cancer Institute or the National Confusion Institute?"
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The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) urges the U.S. Postal Service to consider using irradiation technology to sanitize mail and thus protect workers and the public from bioterrorism. ACSH is a public health consortium of over 350 leading physicians and scientists.
A national panel of public health scientists has declared that childhood vaccinations are safe and has urged Americans to continue to protect their children's health by immunizing them against common childhood diseases.
You can't blame parents for erring "on the safe side" when it comes to their children's health. Unfortunately, parents aren't always good judges of what the "safe side" is.
A recent increase in fear of vaccinations is a case in point. The journal Pediatrics reports that parents' philosophical and religious objections to vaccinations have been a factor in most of the tetanus cases encountered in a Stanford study. A growing number of parents have also become concerned about extremely rare side effects from vaccinations and are choosing not to vaccinate their children.
We don't necessarily agree with everything on these sites, but they're generally pro-science, and we like having them around (and for more links, see: http://www.acsh.org/about/pageID.14/default.asp ):
AgBioWorld: Dedicated to bringing agricultural biotech to the developing world.
http://agbioworld.org/
Blogborygmi.com: Nick Genes and company.
We learned last weekend in a front-page New York Times story that the United States poultry industry has quietly begun to "bow to the demands of public health and consumer groups" by significantly reducing the use of antibiotics that are fed to healthy chickens. Antibiotics have been used for decades as a means of preventing infection in chickens and promoting an accelerated pattern of growth.
Is this move in the interest of promoting public health? And will consumers pay a price for the elimination of these chemicals?
Although popular women's magazines state that they have a commitment to general health coverage, they fail to cover the number one cause of cancer death in women lung cancer according to a new study by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). Further, women's magazines publish a significant number of cigarette advertisements, while neglecting to include basic information on the negative health-related consequences of cigarette smoking.
The first issue of Priorities: For Long Life and Good Health was published in l988, with a mandate to fill an information gap left by popular health magazines specifically, to assist consumers in distinguishing between real health risks and phantom ones.
Is there a difference between objective reporting and "balanced" reporting?
Recently, Xiaorui Zhang, World Health Organization (WHO) coordinator on traditional medicine policy, noted the difficulty in conducting clinical trials of herbal remedies because of two factors: first, participants can detect a difference in taste between the placebo and the herbal therapy; second, quality control is difficult since many of the herbal products contain multiple ingredients, making it tough to determine which chemicals are responsible for any health outcomes. She added: "Western medicine came to China about a hundred years ago.
What in the world are the folks at the World Health Organization thinking these days? They're supposed to be devoting their energies, expertise, and considerable budget to...world health, I believe. You remember: poverty, famine, disease? Yet only a week ago their director general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, announced that the world's most important health challenges now include "junk food," cholesterol, and alcohol. What happened to malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS? (On the bright side, she also mentioned a previously under-appreciated but looming global threat, tobacco.)
Interested in losing weight? Want to do it without: (1) moving, (2) counting calories, (3) restricting food intake, or (4) any change in lifestyle whatsoever, and do it without any detrimental health effects? Well, step right up there are many products designed just to help you accomplish that goal. Then I have some Enron stock to sell you.
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.
"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)
For decades, Americans have relied on the American Lung Association (ALA) for reliable information on respiratory health. But in its recent "State of the Air 2002" report, ALA vastly exaggerates air pollution levels and misleads people into believing air pollution is getting worse, when in fact it has been improving for at least twenty years.
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.
You've heard that quote, "The trouble is not what we know, it's what we know that isn't so?"
Well, one of the things I do at the Reason Public Policy Institute is argue for safety, health, and environmental policy that is rooted in the sound use of science, and more often than not "what we don't know" is glossed over in favor of unsupportable statements of certainty. Time after time, we hear that this policy or that policy is based on "sound science," and that the "debate over the science is done, now it's time to implement!" But it's virtually never that simple.
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).
A recent Associated Press story by David Ho reported that BioPulse, Inc. and BioPulse International, Inc. have settled federal charges with the Federal Trade Commission regarding how they marketed alternative therapies such as insulin-induced hypoglycemic treatment (IHT), which has been used to "treat" cancer.
Editor's note: Tiki the Eco-Penguin's website has been updated since Andrew Apel wrote this article criticizing him for ACSH two years ago, but Tiki, alas, is still online and Apel's criticisms are still insightful.
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