Just as the Stonewall riots of 1969 are remembered as the start of the gay rights movement, so too will July 27, 2002 be remembered as the start of New York City's smokers' rights movement.
At least, that was the plan of the group NYC C.L.A.S.H. (NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment) as they organized a petition drive against proposed New York City laws that would banish smokers from restaurants and even bars a petition drive launched on the site of the pro-gay rights Stonewall riots.
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Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal strongly condemned the Brooklyn Museum of Art recently when that august institution decided to devote a large exhibition space to the art of the Star Wars films. The Journal saw the exhibit as evidence of the decline of civilization while the Times was aghast at the crass commercialization of art. I loved it, and I'd argue that Star Wars movies are more relevant to the real world than they might at first appear.
As I learned one day at an alternative medicine expo, pseudo-scientific health remedies come in all forms: animal, vegetable, and mineral literally. Let's take them in reverse order.
Mineral: Healing with Crystals
Flawed government regulation discourages innovation and delays lifesaving products. Yet as the nation's population ages, Americans are becoming more dependent on medical progress to provide innovative treatments for diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and stroke to cancer.
A chilling example of this tension is the delay of an injectable antibiotic called Tigecycline for infections caused by "resistant pathogens" bacteria that are immune to standard antibiotics.
Every year over 1.5 million adults choose to have some type of vision correction surgery to rid themselves of glasses and/or contact lens dependence. The most popular of these surgeries is LASIK. While glasses and contacts correct a person's eyes with a prescription, LASIK uses a laser to put the prescription directly on a person's cornea the front, clear portion of the eye. The LASIK procedure can correct relatively high degrees of nearsightedness and astigmatism as well as farsightedness.
"[CSPI] has just declared that all that cheese and meaty topping should have only a cameo appearance in a meal, not a starring role. The 'good news' is that they strongly endorse pizza with little or no cheese and lots of vegetables instead of sausage or pepperoni. Isn't that called 'salad'?"
Holly Love, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (brought to our attention by http://www.ConsumerFreedom.com ). Also see ACSH's press release on CSPI's pizza report.
A low-fact diet can be dangerous. Have you heard that chips, fries, and even bread can give you cancer? This "fact" has been widely reported, even though it's essentially untrue.
If anyone doubts the power of letter writing: Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with a cake manufacturer because of my letter (below).
If you would like to take ten minutes and send an "ez-letter" on a smoking issue, go to www.smokefree.org and choose your letter.
Joe
Joe Cherner 375 South End Avenue New York, NY 10280
Yesterday's news that an American citizen had been charged with plotting with al Qaeda to obtain a "dirty nuke" is understandably causing increased anxiety in our already skittish nation. Before we start handing out radiation pills to everyone, however, we need to take a careful look at the real risks we face, and how to counter them.
Where would you expect to hear that paying less and getting more is a bad thing? Only in the often-bizarre world of "public-health" activism.
Yes, according to NANA (the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity), fast-food vendors are robbing you blind by giving you more for less. You can read their report about the cost and calories found in various fast foods at their parent organization's website (http://www.cspinet.org/new/waistline_061802.html).
Among the horrifying findings:
The September 4, 2002 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has both good and bad news for the health of American women and girls. One article (the good news) presents the results of a study on post-menopausal women showing that regular physical activity diminishes the risk of heart disease. The bad news is that a second article in the same issue reports that as girls advance from childhood to mid-adolescence, their levels of physical activity drop precipitously. This pattern does not bode well for their health.
The universal advice that has made guzzling water a national pastime is more urban myth than medical dogma and appears to lack scientific proof..."I have found no scientific proof that absolutely every person must 'drink at least eight glasses of water a day'."
Heinz Valtin, M.D., in an August 8 press release from Dartmouth Medical School.
See the letter ACSH's Ruth Kava wrote to the Wall Street Journal in May and an article she wrote for Priorities last year about the "eight glasses a day" myth.
On that day, the American Heart Association (AHA) went on record (in the journal Circulation) saying that every person in the United States, starting at age twenty, should be regularly evaluated for the risk of having a heart attack or stroke.
Why is the proclamation important?
Is there an "epidemic" of autism? Are vaccinations or dental fillings to blame?
Lately the media has loudly featured, with more noise than facts, the increase in reported cases of autism and the unproved allegation that the mercury derivatives in some vaccines and dental fillings have caused this increase.
We seek ways to improve the condition of those with autism, but enthusiasm mustn't imperil sound science. Wrong answers can make things worse, wasting time and squandering resources.
America's food supply is among the safest and most abundant in the world, thanks in part to a variety of technologies used to safeguard it. Nonetheless, in the last decade or so there has been an increasingly vocal minority that claims our foods are simply not as healthful or nutritious as they used to be. One of their targets is milk.
The Value of Pasteurization
While AIDS is the deadliest sexually-transmitted disease, we easily forget how much more widespread other STDs are. Today, there are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, roughly one out of every 345 people. It has rightly gained mass media attention and come to dominate sex education materials. Let's take a look at the numbers on some other scourges, though:
65 million, or 1 out of every 4 people: The number of people living with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) in the United States.
It's not every day that one of our projects here at the American Council on Science and Health moves people to write poetry. Well, actually, we've posted some ACSH-themed poetry, but rarely has anyone outside the organization written poetry about us, but now the Heartland Institute has.
All right, despite their protectionist laws, ludicrous theories about literature, and surrender-prone combat style, even the French occasionally get something right, and what better time to honor them than now, with Bastille Day upon us (even if the Revolution was a tragically misguided eruption of mass murder that threatened the foundations of civilization)?
Someday, I'm sure, it will become common knowledge that a health scare can be physically baseless yet cause real anxiety. People will learn to resist the urge to find a scapegoat for whatever illnesses happen to exist in the population (including symptoms induced by anxiety itself).
When my friend Ted, who is very skeptical about democracy, sees a crazy person or an idiot, he likes to say, "Remember: that person gets one vote, and you get one vote." The past few weeks have been full of events that make you wonder about the wisdom of the masses but the elites don't come off looking so clever, either:
There have been several reports lately about the odd, non-health-related projects that all that settlement money extracted from the tobacco companies went to, such as bridges, sprinkler systems, and even subsidies to tobacco farmers.
"I'm OK with it, but it'll be a drag if I don't make it until the next James Bond movie comes out."
Warren Zevon, fifty-five year-old singer of "Werewolves of London," on being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, as reported September 12 by Associated Press, which did not mention Zevon's smoking, and Reuters, which did.
Much as famine relief organizations are getting tired of ignorant anti-biotech protesters, the grown-ups at the World Health Organization are getting tired of the reckless kids at Ralph Nader's group Public Citizen. The WHO angrily denies Public Citizen's report claiming that irradiating food to kill bacteria is dangerous (see ACSH's booklet on the topic as well):
I. Bits and Pieces
Where was I...? Can't remember, but I try. Relatives making such a hew and cry, I feel like I'm the sane one amidst neurotic plagues.
No, I shouldn't be fazed, And that's not how the thing's phrased: It's neuritic plaques that have left me dazed, These brain-addling indicators of Alzheimer's disease.
II. Land of the Lost
Pagination
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