Flawed government regulation discourages innovation and delays lifesaving products. Yet as the nation's population ages, Americans are becoming more dependent on medical progress to provide innovative treatments for diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and stroke to cancer.
A chilling example of this tension is the delay of an injectable antibiotic called Tigecycline for infections caused by "resistant pathogens" bacteria that are immune to standard antibiotics.
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Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal strongly condemned the Brooklyn Museum of Art recently when that august institution decided to devote a large exhibition space to the art of the Star Wars films. The Journal saw the exhibit as evidence of the decline of civilization while the Times was aghast at the crass commercialization of art. I loved it, and I'd argue that Star Wars movies are more relevant to the real world than they might at first appear.
If anyone doubts the power of letter writing: Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with a cake manufacturer because of my letter (below).
If you would like to take ten minutes and send an "ez-letter" on a smoking issue, go to www.smokefree.org and choose your letter.
Joe
Joe Cherner 375 South End Avenue New York, NY 10280
On that day, the American Heart Association (AHA) went on record (in the journal Circulation) saying that every person in the United States, starting at age twenty, should be regularly evaluated for the risk of having a heart attack or stroke.
Why is the proclamation important?
Where would you expect to hear that paying less and getting more is a bad thing? Only in the often-bizarre world of "public-health" activism.
Yes, according to NANA (the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity), fast-food vendors are robbing you blind by giving you more for less. You can read their report about the cost and calories found in various fast foods at their parent organization's website (http://www.cspinet.org/new/waistline_061802.html).
Among the horrifying findings:
"[CSPI] has just declared that all that cheese and meaty topping should have only a cameo appearance in a meal, not a starring role. The 'good news' is that they strongly endorse pizza with little or no cheese and lots of vegetables instead of sausage or pepperoni. Isn't that called 'salad'?"
Holly Love, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (brought to our attention by http://www.ConsumerFreedom.com ). Also see ACSH's press release on CSPI's pizza report.
The universal advice that has made guzzling water a national pastime is more urban myth than medical dogma and appears to lack scientific proof..."I have found no scientific proof that absolutely every person must 'drink at least eight glasses of water a day'."
Heinz Valtin, M.D., in an August 8 press release from Dartmouth Medical School.
See the letter ACSH's Ruth Kava wrote to the Wall Street Journal in May and an article she wrote for Priorities last year about the "eight glasses a day" myth.
While AIDS is the deadliest sexually-transmitted disease, we easily forget how much more widespread other STDs are. Today, there are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, roughly one out of every 345 people. It has rightly gained mass media attention and come to dominate sex education materials. Let's take a look at the numbers on some other scourges, though:
65 million, or 1 out of every 4 people: The number of people living with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) in the United States.
It's not every day that one of our projects here at the American Council on Science and Health moves people to write poetry. Well, actually, we've posted some ACSH-themed poetry, but rarely has anyone outside the organization written poetry about us, but now the Heartland Institute has.
There have been several reports lately about the odd, non-health-related projects that all that settlement money extracted from the tobacco companies went to, such as bridges, sprinkler systems, and even subsidies to tobacco farmers.
Bioterrorism: How Great Are the Risks?
Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan
Remarks Delivered at Debate with Richard Preston, Author of The Demon in the Freezer.
Sponsored by the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation
Thursday, November l4, 2002, at the City University of New York
All right, despite their protectionist laws, ludicrous theories about literature, and surrender-prone combat style, even the French occasionally get something right, and what better time to honor them than now, with Bastille Day upon us (even if the Revolution was a tragically misguided eruption of mass murder that threatened the foundations of civilization)?
Someday, I'm sure, it will become common knowledge that a health scare can be physically baseless yet cause real anxiety. People will learn to resist the urge to find a scapegoat for whatever illnesses happen to exist in the population (including symptoms induced by anxiety itself).
America's food supply is among the safest and most abundant in the world, thanks in part to a variety of technologies used to safeguard it. Nonetheless, in the last decade or so there has been an increasingly vocal minority that claims our foods are simply not as healthful or nutritious as they used to be. One of their targets is milk.
The Value of Pasteurization
Scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) find no compelling evidence that acrylamide, when consumed in foods such as French fries and bread, poses a risk of human cancer. Their conclusions are presented today in a report on acrylamide in food and its relation to human health: "Acrylamide in Food: Is It a Real Threat to Public Health?"
A recently-published study (New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 21) describes a new vaccine that can prevent persistent infection from a virus HPV, the human papillomavirus known to be a causative factor in about one-half of all cases of cervical cancer. This is a major breakthrough, for the fight against cervical cancer and, more broadly, for the burgeoning field of pharmaceutical products that may be useful in preventing human cancer.
Cervical Cancer
Today brought another reminder that people writing for the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the reporters responsible for the rest of the paper aren't necessarily on the same wavelength:
When my friend Ted, who is very skeptical about democracy, sees a crazy person or an idiot, he likes to say, "Remember: that person gets one vote, and you get one vote." The past few weeks have been full of events that make you wonder about the wisdom of the masses but the elites don't come off looking so clever, either:
Much as famine relief organizations are getting tired of ignorant anti-biotech protesters, the grown-ups at the World Health Organization are getting tired of the reckless kids at Ralph Nader's group Public Citizen. The WHO angrily denies Public Citizen's report claiming that irradiating food to kill bacteria is dangerous (see ACSH's booklet on the topic as well):
I. Bits and Pieces
Where was I...? Can't remember, but I try. Relatives making such a hew and cry, I feel like I'm the sane one amidst neurotic plagues.
No, I shouldn't be fazed, And that's not how the thing's phrased: It's neuritic plaques that have left me dazed, These brain-addling indicators of Alzheimer's disease.
II. Land of the Lost
Our recent report on the role of beef in the American diet noted some beef benefits, but that didn't please everyone. Below is a prime example of how some of beef's detractors react to such news but we will not be cowed.
Responses:
February 11, 2003
If the Environmental Protection Agency bans something, it must be dangerous, right? Well...
In a newly updated report, Traces of Environmental Chemicals in the Human Body: Are They a Risk to Health?, the physicians and scientists of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) conclude that the mere ability to measure small amounts of environmental chemicals in human blood and other tissue is not an indication of the presence of a health hazard.
One of the most hotly contested issues in the popular nutrition press of late has been cutting carbs: that is, whether or not the much-touted low-carbohydrate, high protein, high fat diet espoused by such diet gurus as Dr. Atkins is better at helping people lose weight than a balanced, moderately high carbohydrate diet. Most mainstream nutrition experts have been leery of the rather extreme Atkins diet, partly out of concern that its high complement of total and saturated fats might cause or exacerbate heart-damaging blood lipid levels.
The refiling of the lawsuit for two obese teen-agers against McDonald's Pelman v. McDonald's brings to mind an old Bill Cosby joke.
Cosby is awakened one morning by his tired wife, who tells him to go down and feed the children breakfast. He eventually does, grumpily, and spies a chocolate cake. His mind goes to the recipe for chocolate cake. There are eggs in chocolate cake. And flour. And milk. There's nutrition in chocolate cake!
Pagination
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