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Following positive results from studies in Asia and Africa on the efficacy of rotavirus vaccines in preventing severe rotavirus gastroeneteritis (RVG), international health experts are promoting the distribution of the vaccine in both continents. RVG causes diarrhea, vomiting and fever, and is responsible for the deaths of about half a million children around the world each year.

International supermodel by day and self-styled public health expert by night, Gisele Bundchen provides new moms with controversial advice in her latest interview with Harper s Bazaar UK: Some people here think they don t have to breastfeed, and I think, Are you going to give chemical food to your child when they are so little?

The millions of people taking calcium supplements to strengthen their bones may be increasing their risk of a heart attack, a study in BMJ has found.

ACSH staffers made cruel fun of the sillier aspects of the new food guidelines on Tuesday, but today we have found something to praise. In Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times, addiction and alcohol expert Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., lauds the addition of alcohol guidelines asserting that moderate consumption — defined as one to two drinks per day — may extend life expectancy and retard cognitive decline.

In another obscure story from the CNN newsroom, anchor Fredricka Whitfield on Saturday asked Dr. Ava Shamban, a Las Vegas dermatologist, which ingredients consumers should avoid in their toothpaste or shampoo. Dr. Shamban showed proclivity for sophistry by responding that “there is absolutely an epidemic of cancer in this country, and we don’t know what contribution all of these products that we use to make yourself more beautiful or to brush our teeth — what they’re doing to us internally.”

The front page of today’s New York Times business section features a topic ACSH addressed on July 9th — the transfer of anti-smoking funding toward anti-obesity efforts.

The Associated Press predicts that China s commitment to ban smoking in all public indoor facilities by January 2011 will go up in a puff of smoke. Unlike the U.S., China which suffers at least one million smoking-related deaths annually ratified a World Health Organization anti-tobacco treaty requiring public places to go smoke-free. Smoking is more deeply entrenched in Chinese culture than in the U.S., with tobacco companies sponsoring Chinese schools.

In a small, preliminary study, magnetic resonance imaging scans of the brain have been used to reliably detect autism, British researchers report in the most recent Journal of Neuroscience.

Widely used dental sealants contain substances that can degrade into Bisphenol A (BPA), a study in the latest issue of Pediatrics concludes.

Wikpedia defines data dredging as “the inappropriate (sometimes deliberately so) use of data mining to uncover misleading relationships in data. These relationships may be valid within the test set but have no statistical significance in the wider population.”

Look for a big advertising campaign beginning a week from Monday about a new all-“natural” lemon-lime soda. PepsiCo is eliminating “Sierra Mist” in favor of “Sierra Mist Natural”, which will be sweetened with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, Advertising Age reports.

After four decades of declines, the U.S. smoking rate appears to have plateaued, the CDC reports.

The California Legislature has approved a bill aimed at limiting radiation exposure, following reports that hundreds of patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and three other hospitals were accidentally overdosed during CT brain scans. The measure requires that radiation dosage levels are recorded on the scanned image and patient’s health record, as well as given to the patient, their physician and the California Department of Health.

Committed cigarette smokers demonstrate that where there’s a will, there’s a way. In order to continue smoking but also circumvent the recent tax hikes on cigarettes, people have come up with a novel solution: roll-your-own cigarette machines. Found in about 150 tobacco outlets in 20 states, these machines produce a carton of cigarettes in about eight minutes and cost about $21, which explains why people wait up to an hour on some days to use this service.

Amid one of the largest egg recalls in U.S. history, some food-safety advocates are criticizing the FDA’s decision not to include mandatory hen vaccinations against salmonella in the agency’s new egg safety rules. After a similar salmonella outbreak in the 1990s, Britain encouraged farmers to inoculate their hens, and last year saw just 581 cases of salmonella poisoning — a 96 percent drop from 1997.

While electronic cigarettes are nothing new to Dispatch readers, they just today made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. The paper reports that e-cigarette companies argue they cannot afford the clinical trials the FDA wants to require for approval and warn that they will be forced to go out of business if the FDA gets its way.

Mental illness among college students is on the rise, the LA Times reports, based on data presented at the American Psychological Association s annual meeting in San Diego.

ACSH staffers breathed a temporary sigh of relief as a provision to ban BPA was omitted from the Food Safety Modernization Act by the Senate health panel on Thursday. The provision was originally introduced by Sen.

Sanofi Aventis rimonabant a diet pill approved but subsequently banned in Europe in 2007 was wrongfully pulled from the market because clinical trials assessing its cardiovascular benefits were prematurely terminated, according to an article published Friday in the Lancet.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reaffirmed Friday a conclusion reached long ago by scientists, upholding a decision that there is no link between autism and vaccines.

ACSH staffers have been troubled over the unjust termination of our trustee Dr. James Enstrom from his professorship at UCLA s School of Public Health, where he has served for the past 34 years. Dr. Michael Siegel, a Boston University School of Public Health professor and ACSH advisor, comes to Dr. Enstrom s defense, arguing he was fired solely because his research findings did not align with the university s political agenda and environmental ideologies:

Shire PLC is withdrawing its low-blood pressure drug ProAmatine from the market following demands from the FDA for additional clinical tests.