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This week, Jay Barber, one of our readers wrote to us asking about an article he had seen in The Intercept regarding the EPA ignoring a possible cancer risk. Luckily we have two toxicologists among our Board of Scientific Advisors, one of who was able to offer a critique.

Pop Quiz: You open the refrigerator and pull out a tasty treat. It’s May 6 and the label says: “Use By” May 4. Do you eat or toss? And what if it said: “Best if Used By”? Although you think you know the correct answer, most of us don’t.

Simple, inexpensive drugs to treat COVID are few and far between. But we may have a new, old pill to add to the arsenal. A new study tells us how well it works.

Social media censorship has exploded since the beginning of the pandemic, in large part thanks to the proliferation of so-called "fact-checkers." While efforts to limit the spread of false information online seem sensible, experts are starting to point out the downsides of tech companies moderating scientific disputes.

While developments will emerge, right now there’s not much information available about apparent problems at the Taishan nuclear power plant. Let's review what is known, and also consider its background, so we have a fuller context. And here are some educated guesses as to what might happen next.

As a result of the latest Presidential election, state legislatures are garnering a great deal of publicity about a host of new laws surrounding voter registration. More quietly, several states, in a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, are also seeking to restrain the activities of our public health officials.

The FDA has at this time received 79 comments for its "Morphine Milligram Equivalents: Current Applications and Knowledge Gaps, Research Opportunities, and Future Directions; Public Workshop."
Here is the 80th.

My Medpage feed offered up this headline: "Let's Stop Subsidizing Obesity." I thought I would find an argument over the continued financial support for sugar and corn. Then, I caught the subhead, “Government benefits should only be spent on nutritious foods.” Let’s consider their argument. 

Most of the extant COVID-19 analyses have been based on national or state-level data; a more granular county-level analysis would be overwhelmed by “noise” since most counties experienced only single-digit daily caseloads. Here we used an intermediate scale, 100 counties that each include a major city. This protocol avoids the noise engendered by small populations and provides enough diversity for meaningful cross-sectional analysis. 

A persistent characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic is the large range of effects over time and among locations, often exceeding an order of magnitude. We analyzed cumulative effects over 15 months, and focused on variability among 100 urban counties concerning selected plausible risk factors. We developed linear regression models and found highly significant risk factors. These models explained up to half of the observed variance, much more than typical epidemiology studies.   

In the past week, two studies reported a nearly two-year loss of life expectancy in 2020 due to COVID-19. While that sounds bad, what exactly does it mean? Life expectancy is one of those terms that can be difficult to grasp. Here’s a closer look at what it means.

Last year the American Medical Association directly challenged the CDC's disastrous Guidance for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, which was issued in 2016. Not surprisingly, Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), a group that was (for some mysterious reason) directly involved with the CDC, responded defensively. Here are my comments on PROP's disingenuous rebuttal.

OK, the headline is a bit like clickbait, I do not believe Ivermectin is useful, but I could be wrong. (Did I just say that?) A new study demonstrates how a rush to publish, (and possibly treat) may have resulted in poorly designed studies where a quiet signal is lost in an abundance of noise.

Starting in March 2020, studies began to show that smokers were under-represented among COVID-19 patients, suggesting that something in tobacco may offer protection against SARS-COV-2 infection. The evidence remains inconclusive, but it seems that some public health experts and journalists don't want to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Over the years, I’ve generated tens of thousands of cubic feet of radioactive waste, managing the radioactive waste program at a large Midwestern university, and as the Radiation Safety Officer at a mid-sized university in the Northeast. None of this was glowing – in any color – and none of it looked much different from any of the other laboratory, medical, or remediation waste produced in so many places around the world every year. 

Orphan crops, private equity and the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, a for-profit medical school?, and how to understand the contradictions of science.

The battles we have witnessed firsthand, or on video, over mask-wearing seem to be all about public health, or personal freedoms, or being isolated. But, of course, those are the obvious reasons. So, how 'bout we look at what psychologists are saying: not about the fighting, but the vehemence of the argument?

Pesticides can be very dangerous; they're also vital tools farmers use to produce our food. Here's a guide to help you navigate the media maze of sloppy reporting on pesticide safety.

A new study suggests that vaccine lotteries won't boost COVID-19 immunizations. Politics and hypocrisy may help explain why these incentive-based campaigns yield disappointing results.

Cultivated meat refers to a “meat-like” product grown in a laboratory, not a cow or pig raised listening to Vivaldi. As the market for plant-based “meat-like” products rapidly expands, is there a place for food produced in the laboratory?

What if you could knock someone off merely by thinking about it – and no way to trace those thoughts to the crime? And more horrendous still: what if you could harm someone because of some subconscious desire, one that you weren’t even aware of? This isn’t the stuff of science fiction. It might even be possible now.

The first general alarm about the lethal effects of community air pollution was sounded in London in December 1952 during a severe fog episode that shut the city down and flooded hospitals and morgues. Subsequent media discussions about the benefits of cleaner air often cite the World Health Organization's global estimate of 7 million air pollution-related deaths annually (about 12% of the total), primarily based on studies of long-term mortality differences among US cities during previous decades. More recent publications have focused on short-term temporal associations. So how do long- and short-term analyses relate?

Last week we took down an article about ivermectin, because of threatening phone calls and emails. Those responses are another sign of the destructive, divisive politicization of scientific discourse. It is another skirmish in the tearing of our national fabric of trust or at least the assumption of goodwill. I have to say something, as a physician and citizen, it is definitely in my lane.

President Biden’s 2022 budget request asks for $75 million to “accelerate toxicity studies and research to inform the regulatory development of designating PFAS as hazardous substances.” Remarkably, the Biden Administration has chosen to single out this group of chemicals. 

What can science tell us about fatherhood? Fathers historically have gotten a deserved but bad rap acting primarily as “hunter-gatherers” rather than as caregivers.