The Food and Drug Administration told Swedish Match that its snus tobacco product will not receive a MRTP designation, as a Modified Risk Tobacco Product. Snus, a small packet of moist tobacco used orally, is popular in Sweden, which has a substantially lower rate of cigarette-related death and disability than other European Union nations.
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About 1,500 cooking fires occur every Thanksgiving, mostly from deep frying turkeys. While this practice is fairly new, my family was exposed to a very different Thanksgiving hazard many years ago: Aunt Wilma's turkey. Which is worse? Hard to say.
The tobacco industry certainly earned its reputation for undermining public health. But now anti-soda activists are using the sobriquet "Big Soda" to get people to think that soda consumption is as bad as cigarette smoking. And thus to enact taxes on sugary beverages as many jurisdictions have on tobacco. Whether this move could really benefit public health remains to be seen.
Surely Pfizer wouldn't mind if you took a closer look at what's listed on its label for Centrum Silver Men, which is marketed to men age 50+, right? Copper sulfate: Pesticide. Silicon dioxide. Glass. Titanium dioxide. Paint. But the biggest dirty little secret about multivitamins is that few people actually need dietary supplements.
Even with the hot-button topic of abortion, there's one thing that nearly everyone can agree upon: having as few abortions as possible. And recent data from the Centers for Disease and Control states that the abortion rate in America has fallen by roughly one fifth from 2004 to 2013.
In 1976, Barry Kidston, a chemistry grad student, would find out the hard way that you had better be careful with your reaction conditions when making psychoactive drugs. He got a little sloppy, and instead of making a pure derivative of Demerol, got an impurity in the batch, which gave him Parkinson's with one injection. Six years later, a group of six "frozen addicts" suffered the same fate. Crazy brain chemistry.
The first member of the cephalosporin class of antibiotics was discovered in the 1940s, in a sewage pipe in Sardinia. Now a group has isolated some novel compounds from lichens gathered in northern Quebec. Three of these have modest antibacterial activity. Can chemists make them more potent?
British scientists came up with a plan to decrease the incidence of the dangerous drug resistant Clostridium difficile: Limit the use of fluoroquinolone antibiotics, such as Cipro, in hospitals.
The Brookings Institute recently released a study on what it terms the "Privacy Paradox," in that officials believe that our concerns about privacy are not monolithic, but contextual. Privacy involves withholding information from others to protect a social image, either for a person or the community he/she inhabits.
According to a recent study, those who had the opportunity to receive "individual wellness coaching by telephone for weight management lost an average of 10 pounds each and changed their weight trajectories from upward to downward."
Should researchers even participate in a study, if the potential exists that the results they collect can benefit the company or industry that employs them? This thought comes to mind after reading the conclusion of a newly-released examination comparing the protective benefits of sunscreen and umbrella shade.
Self-righteousness, gratitude, sympathy, sincerity, and guilt – what if these social behaviours are biologically influenced, encoded within our genes and shaped by the forces of evolution to promote the survival of the human species? Does free will truly exist if our genes are inherited and our environment is a series of events set in motion before we are born?
An untreated iron deficiency could lead to various health problems, one being Iron Deficiency Anemia (IDA). Now, researchers have discovered IDA itself could be linked to another potential problem — hearing loss.
Erectile Dysfunction (ED) adversely impacts over 30 million men in the United States to some extent. Depending upon the cause, treatment options can be limited. Traditionally as a last resort when a man is ineligible or has failed less invasive alternatives, surgical insertion of a penile implant is considered. Promising technology responsive to heat was recently tested and published.
It is no secret that opioid drugs are big news, both because of the escalating number of heroin deaths and new rules that make them very difficult to get—even when you legitimately need them. The latter is thanks to the CDC, but did they use sound evidence to formulate their prescribing advice? It would seem not.
Things aren’t always what they seem – especially in the medical realm. That's precisely what surgeons in Japan discovered when performing an emergency appendectomy. Brain tissue ... in ovaries?!
The Food and Drug Administration has just cracked the whip on the use of antibiotics in animal feed — something that should have been done long ago. However, many of the antibiotics used for this purpose are not used in humans. Does this matter? You may be surprised.
A large outbreak in Washington State of hundreds of cases of mumps – a disease projected to be eliminated from the United States by 2010 – is raising new questions, two in particular. Why is it back? And can we ever rid the nation of it for good?
McKesson Corp. has been repeatedly fined for failing to report suspicious opioid orders, which is required by the Drug Enforcement Agency for all parties in the opioid supply chain. This is not the corporate citizenship and good stewardship its officials claim – and there is little we can do about it.
Not only does bariatric surgery provide substantial weight loss to the obese, but it can also ameliorate the metabolic derangements of diabetes and decrease their need for medications. And, a new randomized study found, these beneficial results aren't transient — they were still apparent five years post-surgery and were superior to the results of strictly medical treatment.
A doctor talking about gun safety is not advocating gun control. Let's get politics out of medicine.
Are you your dog? Is your dog you? The science.
United Healthcare, the largest provider of Medicare Advantage (MA plans) services, is being sued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for fraud. I think they may be right. They are gaming a system designed to protect Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayers from excessive cost and they are very profitable. Did your revenue go up by 11.6% last year? Theirs did.
If the average person is asked to assess their own driving skills, most will give themselves an above average rating. By definition, half of all drivers are below average, but most people lack the self-awareness to realize this due to a cognitive bias known as illusory superiority.
When you are buying gasoline with a particular octane number, joke's on you. There is little or no octane in there, because octane will blow you engine up. A little primer on anti-knock additives. They're not so great either.
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