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The NFL, NHL, NCAA and MLB are all taking concussions seriously and the American Academy of Neurology is following suit with a new set of guidelines announced yesterday that call for athletes of all ages suspected of suffering a concussion to be evaluated by a specialist before returning to play.

Your iPhones and BlackBerrys may need some sort of viral “pesticide” because they may be harboring “more germs than a toilet in a subway bathroom,” a new study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology finds.

As drugs continue to be taken for longer periods of time, unexpected complications may arise that were absent from short-term clinical trials.

The last time you were at McDonald’s, you may have thought twice about whether or not to indulge in a Big Mac after reading its total calorie content — or maybe you didn’t.

Parents philosophically opposed to the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine are responsible for hundreds of sickened children in the last few years, government data show.

Well, BPA is finally making us sick too... no, not the plastic chemical, but all the junk science floating around about it, especially in breathless (but false) media headlines. But a new study is getting a lot of press attention, so there’s no way we can avoid giving it a mention.

A court in Brazil has awarded a former McDonald s franchise manager $17,500 in damages after the manager sued the fast food chain for allegedly making him fat. The 32-year-old says that his employer caused him to gain 65 pounds in 12 years by pressuring him to taste-test the food and offering him free lunches. A similar lawsuit from 2002 tried to accuse the fast food industry of creating addicting foods that ultimately lead to obesity and other health complications.

Use of two or more common OTC painkillers during pregnancy may increase the risk of cryptorchidism (undescended testicles) in male infants, according to a study published in yesterday’s issue of Human Reproduction. The researchers asked 834 Danish and 1,463 Finnish women about their use of medication during pregnancy.

Soon enough, ‘twill be the season to be traveling, and though we may continue to worry about whether or not we remembered to pack a toothbrush, there’s one thing that we absolutely don’t have to fret over: bodily harm from “backscatter X-ray” body scanners at airports. According to a consumer update released by the FDA yesterday, this new technology meets federal safety standards and delivers an amount of radiation equivalent to four minutes of flight time.

Many thanks to one of our readers for calling attention to an error in yesterday s Dispatch. In our story covering the Consumer Product Safety Commission s (CPSC) new voluntary guidelines for the allowable level of cadmium content in consumer products, ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross questions whether the CPSC conducts its own research. But as it turns out that, according to our knowledgeable (but shy) Dispatch reader:

The Associated Press is calling it the most hopeful day in the history of the AIDS epidemic. Yesterday there was news of a new daily pill that dramatically reduces new infections; the pope approved condoms as the the lesser of two evils for preventing HIV infections; and the United Nations declared that the number of new HIV cases worldwide had dropped by a fifth over the past decade.

The vast skepticism held by many Americans about vaccines may be the reason why in excess of 70 million doses of H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine were left unused in the spring of 2010, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even when word of the H1N1 pandemic broke out last year and fear of the virus was widespread, fewer than half of all adults surveyed were willing to get vaccinated.

Beginning in March 2011, the European Union will outlaw the use of bisphenol A (BPA) in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, and their import and sales will be proscribed in June 2011.
Labeled an “estrogen-like chemical” and “endocrine disruptor,” BPA was banned from baby products in Canada earlier this year.

By a vote of 73 to 25, the Senate yesterday passed the Food Safety and Modernization Act. The bill, which was opposed by TV news commentator and Tea Party activist Glenn Beck, among others, will now be up for consideration by the House of Representatives. The bill would give the FDA the power to mandate food recalls — authority it has not previously possessed. Its stated aim is to improve procedures assuring food safety.

(Originally published in Forbes.com, Nov. 17, 2010)
Britain's health secretary just made a historic announcement.
In late October Andrew Lansley announced that the British government's drug rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), would be stripped of its power to refuse new medicines based on cost.

We hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving feasts last week. For those concerned about the safety of their meals, the National Review Online’s The Corner publicized ACSH’s Holiday Dinner Menu — now in its 28th year of circulation — in an op-ed by ACSH’s Dr.

The efficacy of India’s anti-malaria efforts are being called into question following the publication of a recent study showing that malaria kills 13 times more Indians than previously estimated by the WHO. Published in The Lancet last month, the study, co-funded by the Center for Global Health Research and U.S.

Dendreon’s pricey metastatic prostate cancer drug Provenge has won the approval of a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services advisory panel, which says the drug should be covered by Medicare. Cleared for U.S.

If pharmaceutical drugs were able to compete in a high school popularity contest, then Merck & Co.’s new experimental cholesterol medication anacetrapib would be voted “most likely to reduce the risk of stroke, cardiovascular (CV) events and death.” The novel drug is able to increase high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the “good” cholesterol, while simultaneously lowering low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol.

Here’s a story that you probably didn’t read in your morning newspaper: An international panel of experts meeting in Canada has rebuked the numerous bodies in recent years that have restricted the common plastic hardening chemical bisphenol A (BPA). The panel has concluded that the levels of BPA circulating in the human body “are very low, indicating that BPA is not accumulated in the body and is rapidly eliminated through urine.”

The panel went on to say:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is on yet another health crusade — this time against salty soups. Hizzoner is spending $370,000 in city and federal funds on subway ads featuring salt spewing from a can of chicken and rice soup.

DDT was banned in the United States since 1972 as part of a worldwide campaign against the pesticide a crusade that has perversely (and we presume unintentionally) been responsible for the loss of millions of African children from preventable malaria deaths. But the excellent powder is now being blamed for thinning condor eggs in California well, one or two eggs, anyway.

Interesting juxtaposition in the pages of Yale Public Health. Page 6 of the fall 2010 issue reports on a study by Yale’s Jason M. Fletcher, Ph.D., that found increased taxes on soda and restricting sugary drinks from school vending machines are having a “negligible effect” on childhood obesity. Kids just find substitutes or buy soft drinks elsewhere, thestudy found.

There’s good news when it comes to treating tuberculosis. New therapies are on their way to treat patients with hard-to-treat drug-resistant forms of the infectious lung disease, the director of the World Health Organization’s Stop TB Department says.