Radical environmentalists have pointed to chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates as “toxins” responsible for causing obesity, cancer, and even male infertility due to decreased sperm counts. As proof, they cite a 1992 study by a group of Danish researchers that claimed sperm counts declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1991. However, their research was heavily criticized for its many flaws, methodological problems, and biases.
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The results of a new study should provide ample relief for coffee-loving women who are worried about heart disease.
The Supreme Court handed down a decision yesterday that represents a significant victory for the pharmaceutical industry. The court s 5-to-4 ruling shields generic drug makers from failure-to-warn lawsuits as long as their product labels are identical to those of brand-name manufacturers. Generic pharmaceutical companies Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Mylan Inc.
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls: there are obesity updates for all. For all the kids out there, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a new report Wednesday offering early childhood obesity prevention advice for daycare centers and households alike.
In other weight loss news, one of the authors of a new study recommends that weight loss surgeries, such as gastric bypass and gastric banding, become front line type 2 diabetes treatments.
A bipartisan bill introduced to Congress by Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey the Generating Antibiotics Incentives Now (GAIN) Act attempts to spur interest among pharmaceutical companies to develop new and effective antibiotics, traditionally an unprofitable sector of the drug market. The new bill hopes to change all that by creating certain incentives.
For the first time, FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg is publicly addressing the growing problem of monitoring the safety of imported food, drugs, and medical devices in her new report, Pathway to Global Safety and Quality. Currently, more than 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) sold in the U.S. are manufactured overseas, and in 2008, government officials estimated it would take the FDA 13 years to inspect each foreign drug manufacturing plant. Dr.
Epidemiologically speaking, having your doctor write a prescription for your lover may be preferable to sending a love letter. It is now legal in 27 states for a physician to write a prescription for a patient s unnamed sexual partner when the patient himself has been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease (STD). The practice is called expedited partner therapy (EPT), and it s proving to be an effective means of reducing the rates of sexually transmitted diseases that can be treated with antibiotics.
On the heels of the new graphic cigarette warning labels comes a proposed law in Australia that aims to institute plain packaging for all cigarette brands. The Australian government plans to ban company logos on cigarette packs while requiring they be sold in plain dark olive packaging. In addition, all brand names must appear in the same size and style of font; health warning labels will supplant traditional trademark logos.
Quick, run for cover: junk food ads are out to get your children and make them fat. Or at least that s what the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is now preaching. As described in a new policy statement published in the journal Pediatrics, the AAP s Dr. Victor Strasburger asserted, It s time for the food industry to clean up its act and not advertise junk food to young children.
ACSH has been skeptical about the recent move by various school districts (about 30 percent nationwide since 2006) to reduce the toll of childhood obesity by sending overweight or obese children home with letters reporting their body-mass index (BMI), which is a crude measure of weight relative to height.
Anyone who s had chicken pox (varicella zoster, a member of the herpes family of viruses) has a one-in-three chance of developing shingles many years later, and the risk only increases with age. Yet although the FDA approved a vaccine (Zostavax) for the virus in 2006 and, this March, approved its use for those age 50 and over, very few at-risk adults have been vaccinated. Adults over 60 are most vulnerable to shingles, but in 2009, only 10 percent of this population was vaccinated.
On the eastern front, we have yet another example of Mayor Bloomberg s overreaching food bans this time, he s targeting vending machines and concession stands in municipal buildings. His health police gave orders this week to nine vendors, stipulating that they have six months to ensure that beverages containing over 25 calories per eight-ounce serving occupy no more than two slots on any vending machine.
In Tuesday s Wall Street Journal, Melinda Beck investigates the efficacy of the ubiquitous multivitamin. What she uncovers, in fact, is that the majority of us don t need one at all. Beck points to a 2007 National Institutes of Health (NIH) panel, which concluded that the present evidence is insufficient to recommend either for or against the use of [multivitamins and minerals] by the American public to prevent chronic disease.
The Safe Cosmetics Act, now in a 2011 edition, is back in Congress and its claims about cosmetics ingredient safety are about as superficial as the pro
Should the cancer drug Avastin be approved as a treatment for metastatic breast cancer? The FDA has been considering this question since the emotionally charged debate began last December, when the agency first proposed revoking the drug s indication for that use. As expected, on Wednesday, an FDA advisory panel voted unanimously to recommend the revocation, citing follow-up studies by the manufacturer, Roche, that showed that the drug did not significantly increase survival time.
Pfizer s smoking cessation drug Chantix continues to be problematic since its 2006 appearance in U.S. pharmacies. The prescription drug, which works by blocking nicotine receptors, has already been associated with psychiatric side effects and it now appears to lead to some cardiovascular problems in patients who have a history of heart disease.
A study just published in Clinical Cancer Research has confirmed that treating HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer with the drug trastuzumab (Herceptin) is as effective as chemotherapy or surgery. Of particular interest is that the drug can treat metastases involving the brain, often a problem with chemotherapy, since many drugs cannot penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
Efforts to improve the healthfulness of school lunches are increasingly evident, from upping kids portions of fruits and vegetables to (rather unfathomably) removing chocolate milk from the cafeteria. Still, a news story from Colorado reminds us that there is still a ways to go.
In a drug trial that would prove an advance for both HIV prevention and biotech, European scientists are testing the efficacy of an anti-HIV antibody that was cultivated via a genetically modified tobacco plant. The biological product, produced by the EU-funded Pharma Plant, would be used as a vaginal microbicide to prevent sexual transmission of HIV; it is currently being tested in 11 healthy women in Britain.
A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology analyzed the medical records of almost 92,000 U.S. adults and concluded that taking cholesterol-controlling statins is not associated with a higher risk of cancer. But whoever said there was such a link to begin with? asks ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross.
Tuberculosis (TB) test-kit manufacturers were castigated by the World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday, while their sales in developing countries were placed under immediate ban due to unacceptable levels of wrong results and perverse financial incentives to boost sales, according to a WHO statement.
Generic drugs should be manufactured to look exactly like their name brand counterparts, write Dr. Jeremy Greene and Dr. Aaron Kesselheim in an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine. But under a current federal regulation known as trade dress, generics cannot be produced to resemble branded medications already on the market.
The only ones still urging consumers to strive to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day are the bottled water companies, argues Dr. Margaret McCartney in a British Medical Journal commentary. Dr.
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