As the FDA prepares for a March hearing to assess whether synthetic food dyes cause hyperactivity in children, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is asking that they be banned altogether. Last year, the European Parliament banned synthetic food dyes — used to improve the appearance of packaged foods — in products geared towards babies and young children.
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Following up on a 2009 law which gave it the power to regulate tobacco products, the FDA announced yesterday that manufacturers must report to the agency by March 22 on whether their products are in any way more dangerous or more addictive than items which were on the market by February 15, 2007. ACSH's Dr.
Students in Minnesota’s second-largest school district have limited time to tame their sweet tooth during regular school hours since all public schools in the St. Paul district will be “sweet free zones” by the end of this academic year. Once implemented, the St. Paul district will join a handful of other districts nationwide.
Talk about waking up on the wrong side of the bed — results of a new study suggest that the popular sleep aid Ambien, sold generically as zolpidem, can leave folks over 60 temporarily groggy and clumsy when awakened abruptly.
If two Senators have their way, baseball fans will no longer have to watch their favorite ball players spit in the dugout or field — at least not tobacco, that is. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) want the Major Leagues to ban smokeless tobacco based on a survey showing that the use of smokeless tobacco among high school boys has increased by 36 percent since 2003.
After rejecting the approval of three new weight-loss drugs in the past few months, the FDA on Wednesday implemented a change which represents a minor advance in the fight against the obesity epidemic: lowering the requirements for patients who wish to use Allergan’s Lap-Band stomach-restricting device. Now, people with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 and an associated obesity-related health condition, such as hypertension or diabetes, are eligible for the procedure.
Representatives from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) testified yesterday before the subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee alongside representatives of various small businesses and manufacturers regarding the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) of 2008. Both congressmen and business owners argue that the regulation is burdensome and stifles job creation.
A story in The New York Times about a report to be published in The American Journal of Surgery suggests that far more American women are undergoing invasive surgical biopsies for breast cancer than is warranted. Current guidelines hold that at most ten percent of all breast cancer biopsies should be surgical while the remainder should be performed simply with a needle.
Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals refused to reevaluate an appellate court’s December 2010 decision to not grant the FDA the authority to regulate e-cigarettes as medical devices. The FDA has lost another battle in the effort to require e-cigarette manufacturers to conduct expensive clinical trials to prove their devices are safe. These regulations are required of other smoking cessation products such as nicotine patches.
The American College of Physicians (ACP) announced new guidelines for the assessment of lower back pain that call for fewer imaging scans. According to the ACP “best practice advice,” routine, imaging such as X-rays and CT or MRI scans often reveal abnormalities that are not, in fact, life-threatening.
There’s good news for women worried about their annual mammogram — the FDA has just approved a new 3-D mammography device that may help doctors more accurately detect breast cancer.
City Council member Peter Vallone, Jr. was not happy with ACSH’s recent response to his efforts to ban the fluoridation of New York’s tap water. Ignoring decades of evidence that the addition of fluoride, a substance that protects against cavities, has been one of the most effective public health measures of the century, Mr. Vallone insists that its continued use poses a health risk. Mr.
Late last week brought news that the World Health Organization (WHO) has been working to facilitate a worldwide ban on ads for foods high in sugar, fat and salt intended for children. To that end, the WHO has arranged for a meeting of heads of state to discuss restrictions on ads for foods the WHO considers unhealthy.
Yesterday also brought word that the widely-read online journal Salon was deleting a 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the purported — but actually non-existent — relationship between autism and childhood vaccination.The son of the former U.S. Attorney General, Kennedy is a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in literature and history.
ACSH has long been a leader in the fight against cigarettes, and we take pride in the work we have done to inform the public about the vast (and little-known) spectrum of real risks posed by cigarettes.At the same time, we firmly believe that educating the public on this important issue requires truth-telling and not appealing to hysteria.
Three different heart groups — the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology and the Heart Rhythm Society — all have just announced that the recently approved anticoagulant dabigatran (Pradaxa) should be considered as an alternative to warfarin (Coumadin) as treatment for patients suffering from atrial fibrillation.Researchers have concluded that Pradaxa offers some significant advantages to Coumadin.
In a surprise ruling, the FDA decided yesterday to reject the weight-loss drug Contrave even though an advisory panel ruled 13-to-7 to recommend its approval in December. Developed by Orexigen Therapeutics Inc., Contrave was shown to reduce body weight by 5 percent or more in at least 35 percent of patients, but the agency dismissed the drug’s potential benefits after research revealed it caused a slight increase in blood pressure and pulse rates compared to placebo.
It’s time to hit the seafood buffet as a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms what we knew all along: exposure to mercury in fish has no clinically adverse effect on cardiovascular disease. After analyzing data from two U.S. cohorts comprised of over 170,000 participants, researchers selected 3,427 patients who were identified as having new onset of cardiovascular disease.
Though not an endemic problem in the U.S., diarrhea remains a common life-threatening event in third-world countries, killing about 1.4 million children under the age of five every year. But there are preventive measures and treatments that can reduce this number, and a new study by Christa Fischer Walker of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health used a computer program to model how some of these methods can impact diarrhea incidence in 68 target countries.
Though the rate of smoking among U.S. adults has remained relatively stagnant over the past few years — hovering around 20 percent as reported by the CDC in September — there is still some good news to be had. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association uses two large, population-based surveys comprising a total of 1,662,353 respondents to determine if smokers are smoking fewer cigarettes.
A meta-analysis of 16 studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that low-radiation heart CT scans, known as gated CT’s, are equally effective in diagnosing heart problems as a coronary angiography, the current gold standard. The angiogram, done via a catheter inserted through an artery into the heart, however, is invasive and not without risk, so some doctors resort to a CT scan for diagnosing patients with chest pain instead.
A new study sheds light on the difficulties physicians experience when trying to control the lipid levels in patients with coronary artery disease. Published in the American Journal of Cardiology, the study reviewed the electronic records of approximately 10,000 patients seen at a cardiology practice between September 2008 and September 2009 to assess whether the patients were achieving recommended cholesterol and triglyceride goals.
According to a report released yesterday by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, the overall rate of new breast cancer cases diagnosed among white women did not significantly change between 2003 and 2007. This contrasts with a sharp decline of 7 percent which took place between 2002 and 2003, according to an analysis of data published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention.
A new study published in the journal Gastroenterology contains some unexpected and seemingly highly significant findings: the data indicate that those patients who have gallstones or who have had their gallbladder removed are at an increased risk of death over an 18-year period than people without the disease.In fact, researchers examining the medical records of more than 14,000 people found that patients with gallbladder disease (eit
A disquieting new study published online in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes shows that research into heart devices isn’t properly considering the effects of these devices on women or employing comparable numbers of female test subjects.A research team led by Dr.
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