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It s not often hardly ever that we at the American Council on Science and Health agree with a public stance by the food police at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. But our Dr. Josh Bloom did just that at our Dispatch meeting this morning. (Traitor!)

We re normally fans of New York Times science writer Jane Brody but her latest column on quitting smoking is incorrect and irresponsible. To begin with, she claims that, People ages 18 to 25 now have the nation s highest smoking rate: 40 percent. Um, no.

The evidence is mounting that routine hits during contact sports especially football and hockey can cause long-term brain injury, but somehow that news hasn t made it into the heads of hockey coaches, who continue to put young athletes at risk, according to a pair of new studies.

Expectant mothers will soon be able to know quite a bit more about the unborn child they re carrying maybe more than they need to know. New gene tests that go far beyond traditional chromosomal evaluation in looking for genetic abnormalities are on the horizon. Genetic microarray analysis promises to detect everything from autism to club foot, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today "Off Label Advice for Doctors- The Appeals Court is Dead On"
Off-label drugs-- those used for indications other than what the drug was originally approved for-- have been used for many years. Most of us have probably benefited from this practice, but despite this, it has been illegal for a pharmaceutical sales rep to even mention a possible off-label use of any drug to doctors.

As the flu season rages across the U.S., a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine says the flu vaccine does not increase risk of fetal loss. On the contrary, the research found that the vaccination may actually prevent some deaths, because getting the flu while pregnant makes fetal death more likely.

Last October, we covered a meta-analysis giving all of us who hate those routine physical exams a good excuse to skip it. The analysis, which looked at 16 clinical trials involving 182,880 patients, revealed that patients who had annual general health checkups died at virtually the same rate as those who didn t.

Mayor Bloomberg s ban on the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces, scheduled to go into effect in March, will not take hold if the beverage and restaurant industries have their way. They urged a New York City judge to block the ban, calling it an unconstitutional overreach that burdens small businesses and infringes upon personal liberty.

Research shows that poor coordination among providers all-too-often leads to patients returning to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged. Readmissions following hospitalizations for heart failure, acute MI (heart attack), and pneumonia are common among Medicare beneficiaries, researchers reported in JAMA .

"The EU s new tobacco policy statement, ostensibly designed to promote public health, will have the opposite effect: Far from reducing the toll of tobacco, millions will be condemned to ongoing addiction to smoking, half of whom will die as a direct result.
The World Health Organization predicts that if current trends continue, the likely toll of tobacco will amount to one billion lives cut short worldwide.

An individual diagnosed with an autism disorder during childhood may no longer fall in the autism spectrum as an adult, suggests a new study. As adults, their social functioning is very good, they re all functioning in mainstream education with no support, says study author Deborah Fein, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut who studies autism.

Before taking headlines at face value, make sure the study authors have the facts right. A new meta-analysis concludes that blood transfusions after a myocardial infarction (heart attack) doubles the mortality risk and increases the chance of subsequent MI in survivors but the study is riddled with serious epidemiological fallacies that render this conclusion suspect, at best.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) an autoimmune disease in which the body s immune system attacks healthy tissue, mainly in and surrounding joints but in other regions as well affects an estimated 1.5 million Americans, with an estimated 30 to 40 percent of them beyond the help of available drugs.

Here s a bit more evidence that our health care system is fraught with waste and inefficiency: Women who have had a hysterectomy only rarely need a Pap test, but new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show most get the test anyway.

Patients can refuse a flu shot. Should doctors and nurses have that right, too? The answer to this thorny question is simple No. Sick and immunocompromised hospital patients should not need to fear being infected with the flu virus by those charged with ministering to them, and healthcare workers should not have to also deal with ill medical workers who didn t get immunized, nor bear their sick co-employees share of the burden.

Binge drinking defined as consuming four or more alcoholic drinks at one time is a dangerous activity that can take a toll on anyone s health. And, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed in a new report, it is an activity that almost 14 million American women indulge in about three times a month.

Depression during pregnancy is not an uncommon affliction, affecting between 1 in 5 and 1 in 14 women throughout the developed world. A new study suggests pregnant women suffering from depression should be able to take a certain class of antidepressants without worrying about harming their baby.

As you may recall, yesterday s Dispatch covered a distorted, alarmist story on the harms of pesticides.
Will Westerling, a licensed Pest Control Advisor in the State of California, wrote in with his views.

It s no secret that the US has been (and still is) facing a life-threatening shortage of common hospital drugs. Much has been written about this frightening problem, including a 2011 op-ed in the New York Post by ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom entitled Running out of Common Drugs.

BPA is in the news yet again, and this time it is being linked to childhood asthma. According to the new study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, children who are exposed to BPA are at an increased risk for asthma. But from reading the article, we found a paucity of data to support that assertion. In fact, maybe just the opposite.

A Mississippi baby born two and a half years ago has been functionally cured of HIV, according to doctors and scientists. The baby was aggressively treated with antiretroviral drugs starting around 30 hours after birth something that is not standard practice.
The unidentified child has been off medication for about a year with no signs of the HIV infection. This is already unprecedented. If the child remains healthy, it would mark only the second time in the world s history that a person has been cured of HIV the only other case involved a bone marrow transplant.

Antioxidants, and eating a diet filled with antioxidant-rich foods, have often been touted as contributing to disease protection including warding off dementia. A new study, however, has shed some light on the science: older adults who eat diets high in antioxidants had the same risk of dementia or stroke as the comparison group who consumed the lowest amount of the substances.

Bariatric surgery, one of several procedures performed on obese patients to produce rapid weight loss, does not provide the medical savings originally hoped for over the six years following the operation, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The FDA has issued its strongest warning a boxed warning to physicians advising against the use of codeine as a painkiller for children following surgery to remove either tonsils or adenoids a common procedure, estimated to occur about 500,000 times annually. The warning states that kids given codeine following these procedures could experience fatal breathing problems.

When screening patients for lung cancer with CT scanning, a more restrictive definition of a positive result could produce fewer false positive diagnoses, with their attendant unnecessary follow-up studies, including biopsies and surgery.
This conclusion, from a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is based on a higher nodule-size threshold for follow-ups from 5 mm to 6 to 8 mm lesion size before starting a more intensive work-up.