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Today’s Investor’s Business Daily includes an editorial lauding the new paper by ACSH’s Dr. Josh Bloom on the central role that the American pharmaceutical companies played in taming the AIDS epidemic. Under the headline, “Capitalism Kills AIDS,” the paper comments:

Yesterday brought word from two continents of extraordinary government action — and absurd lies — regarding tobacco.In the U.S., Judge Gladys Kessler announced a decision requiring tobacco companies to run advertisements and put notices on their product packages acknowledging that they deliberately misled the public about the health effects of so-called light cigarettes and the addictiveness of nicotine.

Two of the largest manufacturers of mentholated cigarettes initiated a lawsuit against the FDA Friday to prevent the consideration of an upcoming FDA panel report recommending expanding the current flavored cigarette ban to include menthol varieties. Lorillard and R.J.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients with active, progressive disease will be happy to learn that a needle-free treatment option may be available in the near future. Pfizer’s oral medication tofacitinib has made it through Phase III clinical trials. The drug inhibits a family of enzymes known as Janus kinases (JAK), which are involved in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Pfizer also hopes to use the drug for other conditions such as psoriasis ACSH's Dr.

The journal Obstetrics and Gynecology offers a new and intriguing study of 84,401 low-income California women taking birth control pills.

Environmentalists are agitated by chemical industry trade group CropLife America’s increased spending to thwart EPA efforts to create stricter regulations on pesticide use. According to The New York Times, CropLife America spent $751,000 on lobbying in the last three months of 2010 — a 58 percent increase from the previous year’s expenditures — in response to signs that the EPA aims to increase regulations.

A study released yesterday in The Lancet reveals that about 50 percent of men in the general population are infected with the human papillomavirus (HPV). Though approximately 120 different strains of HPV exist, the most worrisome types — HPV-16 and HPV-18 — are sexually transmitted and cancer-causing (oncogenic).

On Friday the FDA acknowledged that it was reconsidering whether to permit pharmacies and drug stores to sell at-home genetic testing kits.

Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide. At least that’s what the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) would have you believe in its report Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health, supported by the World Health Organization (WHO).

There is no such thing as a safe form of tobacco, says Joseph Lee, a social research specialist for the Department of Family Medicine at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in an op-ed last week for Raleigh’s NewsObserver.com.

The March issue of Pediatrics presents some startling if unexplained findings about infant health. Researchers who conducted a study of 847 babies in eastern Massachusetts found that there was a 6.3 fold increase in the likelihood that a child would be obese at age three if a bottle-fed infant began eating solid foods before four months of age compared to bottle-fed infants who began eating solid foods after four months.

Despite receiving even an A-list celebrity testimonial on their efficacy, e-cigarettes have gotten a lot of flack from public health opponents who argue that the clean nicotine delivery device is harmful and contains “toxic” chemicals.

Yesterday's The New York Times underscored the risks associated with anal cancer — facts largely unknown to many U.S. adults.

In testimony before the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee Wednesday, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claimed that cuts to the EPA’s budget would devastate both the country’s land and water and the health of its people. Her assertions were made in response to proposals from both the Obama administration and House Republicans to cut her agency’s budget. The Obama administration wants to cut the EPA’s budget from $10.3 billion in the present fiscal year to $9.0 billion in the next fiscal year.

The New York City Council approved a bill Wednesday expanding the City’s public smoking ban to beaches and parks after a study showed 57 percent of New Yorkers had cotinine, a nicotine byproduct, in their blood compared with a 45 percent national average. Proponents of the measure argue that it was passed in the name of public health.

After the widespread implementation of the Tdap (Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis) vaccine among children, the U.S. nearly achieved complete eradication of pertussis, better known as whooping cough. But in the past two decades, the number of cases of this highly contagious bacterial disease has been on the rise, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association will make for some provocative headlines. A group of researchers from Tufts University studied the cardiovascular risks of episodic physical and sexual activity, specifically in a cohort of habitually inactive patients.

Following a report issued by the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC) last week claiming that a menthol cigarette ban would be beneficial to public health, journalist Denise Mann revisits the issue in her article for WebMD, “Are Menthol Cigarettes Riskier Than Non-Menthol?” Ms.

The food police agenda does not stop at attacking fast food. Last week we pointed out how the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), hungry for attention once again, petitioned the FDA to ban artificial dyes from food because they assert it exacerbates hyperactivity in some children (thankfully, the FDA denied their petition citing no evidence of this claim).

A new study presented this week at the American College of Cardiology conference in New Orleans and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine has some rather surprising results: bypass surgery does not improve survival for heart failure patients already on optimal drug therapy. Dr.

In a survey asking approximately 250,000 people about their current and past smoking habits, researchers learned that smoking causes half a million deaths annually in the U.S. — an increase from the prior estimates of about 450,000 deaths. To put this in perspective, about 2.5 million Americans die each year from all-cause mortality, indicating that smoking-related deaths account for approximately 20 percent of all fatalities.

Lung cancer deaths aren’t the only fatality on the decline. New estimates released today by the Transportation Department show that 32,788 Americans were killed in traffic-related accidents in 2010, which is the fewest number of deaths since 1949.

Until recently, patients diagnosed with active, autoantibody-positive lupus, or systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), were treated with decades-old sub-optimal therapies such as aspirin, anti-malarials (Plaquenil), corticosteroids and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. But on Wednesday, the FDA approved Human Genome Sciences’ Benlysta, the first new drug on the market to treat lupus in over 50 years.

While speaking to over 30 University of North Carolina Wilmington students, Paul Turner Jr., director of the N.C. Spit Tobacco Education Program and former director of the CDC’s oral health division, haphazardly groups various smokeless nicotine products, including dip, snuff and snus, into one category — harmful to human health — despite each having its own risk profile.

It comes as no surprise to ACSH staffers that the newest CDC statistics indicate that prediabetes is on the rise in the U.S. One obvious reason is that more and more Americans are becoming overweight or obese.