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Bioengineered crops save lives, so why are so many against it? The CDC has good news on vaccination rates in the U.S., but we're not at 100% yet. More Ebola fears, this time, a community takes it a bit too far.

Earlier this week, we discussed a study conducted by Frederick vom Saal, the best-known fringe anti-BPA activist posing as a scientist, attempting to link high levels of BPA in the blood stream and urine from the handling of thermal paper cash receipts to increased risk of serious diseases. Yet, as ACSH advisor Dr. Geoffrey

Ebola has come to New York City and Americans continue to worry about the possibility of an Ebola epidemic in the United States, apparently even going so far as to buy sham Ebola cures online. However, two New York Times articles argue that the possibility of an Ebola epidemic in the US is still highly unlikely.

The percentage of women giving birth prematurely in the United States has dropped to 11.4 percent in 2013 - about 450,000 babies - says the March of Dimes premature births report card the lowest percentage in 17 years. About 231,000 fewer babies

In her follow-up to last week s column on cancer screening s pros and cons in general, Jane E. Brody takes on screening mammography for breast cancer in today s New York Times Science section: Retesting Breast Cancer Axioms. She addresses the conflict women face as to when to start

on Entine, the executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, and a Senior Fellow at the World Food Center, Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy at the University of California-Davis (and author of ACSH s Chemophobia

What appears to be a big decision by McDonald s to keep using their current potatoes rather than switch to GM potatoes turns out to be, at least scientifically, no decision at all. This is because on this particular

This morning ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava participated in a radio show on Ohio Public Radio The Sound of Ideas available here. The show s

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) proposed a plan to significantly increase the information reported on clinical trials related to drugs, devices, and other interventions. The proposed plan would apply to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) publicly accessible database, ClinicalTrials.gov.

For years, we ve been hearing about how the obesity epidemic will pose an ever-greater public health threat if we don t somehow manage to slow it down. Obesity puts one at risk for diabetes, debilitating arthritis

Catch the latest health news: ACSH's Ariel Savransky attends an e-cig conference along with industry leaders and public officials, GM labeling benefits no one, except the organic food industry, and why public officials are seeking more transparency when it comes to data from medical trials.

While spokesmen for the MN Dept. of Health bent over backwards to make the smoking/tobacco news into a good news, bad news story, in fact the actual public-health story is all good: historic decline in teen smoking!

Last June, California lawmakers introduced a bill requiring soft drinks to be labeled with a warning linking the drinks to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. The bill was defeated by the state assembly. Now New York is

At ACSH, we probably spend more time debunking phony or overblown fears than anything else. Between bad science, hidden agendas, and terrible press coverage we never run out of things to do.
Although most scares vaccines, minute traces of chemicals in the environment, or GM foods, for example are baseless, this does not mean that all of them are.

While headlines scream about a link between exposure in the womb to common chemicals and lowered IQs in kids later on, the study these alarms are based upon is just more of the same old junk and data manipulation.

In today s Why didn t I think of that? feature, a simple, but elegant solution that could partially eliminate the guessing game: Which chemotherapy drugs are better to treat a given cancer?
While some chemotherapy regimens are well-established to treat a certain type of cancer, in some ways, cancer chemotherapy is still a guessing game.

The association between cataracts the clouding of the lens of the eye and taking statins the widely used cholesterol-lowering drug class has been studied in the past and results have been inconsistent and controversial. A new observational study conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia led

We ve all heard it before many times Eat more fruit and vegetables for a healthy, balanced diet. But what if you can t? What if you live in a so-called food desert where really fresh produce is not to be found? And even if it were around, you couldn t afford it?

Teaser: House leadership urges FDA (and DHHS) to reconsider its stringent adherence to the date at which e-cigarettes were exempted from onerous regulatory hurdles, which if enacted would bankrupt most of them.

A new antibiotic has been discovered that has been found to treat many common bacterial infections. Incredibly, no resistance has been detected so far. The research was published this week in the journal Nature.

As reported in today s Wall Street Journal, an FDA advisory panel has voted unanimously to recommend the approval of a new product from Novartis called Zarxio. Assuming that the FDA follows the panel s advice (they usually do), a bit of pharmaceutical history will be made the ability of companies to develop and market biologic drugs that are similar to those of other companies.

We have written about the antibiotic crisis quite often, both in Dispatch and published op-eds. Many others have done the same.
Although much of the focus has been on the development of new antibiotics to combat resistant bacteria, there are other fronts in this war. Although the need for antibiotics is undisputed, it is better not to need them in the first place. This is an area in which good progress has been made.

In health news: why no one is to blame for this year's failed flu shot, one in five hysterectomies are unnecessary, & here's one supplement we do love!

A new report analyses a vast trove of data on diabetes, studying the effects of more intense control of blood sugar based upon age and medical conditions. The answers are not clear.

Apple or pear? These are two fruits often used to describe an individual s body shape. An apple-shaped person tends to carry excess fat around the midsection and a pear-shaped person carries more fat in