Municipalities may feel justified in trying to up the ante in the vaccine wars. Drunk drivers who kill somebody can be charged with manslaughter. Perhaps they have a point in saying this law should be extended to those who, through negligence, sicken or kill another person with a vaccine-preventable illness. That is certainly a far more palatable option than filling up tiny coffins.
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Formaldehyde is one of the most demonized chemicals. Know-nothings try to terrify us about the 10 milligrams of the chemical you get from a packet of aspartame. But did you know that your body produces, uses, and eliminates 50,000 mg of the stuff every day? That's because every living cell in our body requires formaldehyde.
Did team sports for kids evolve from hunter-gatherers who needed to practice for war? A new paper suggests that is so.
A male physician disparages female doctors. Things don't go well for him. However, we now can have an honest discussion about the issue.
Here's an example of how a kernel of insight from a study evolves into a news item, which can then become a health concept that people can unwittingly incorporate into their personal exercise routines. And all for no good reason.
The siren song of precision medicine is lost in the translation, from the laboratory to the bedside. Two studies suggest that precision medicine is more an aspirational term than reality.
What physical risks do you run during a race of this length? Since high-mileage training can drain the body of vital nutrients, the short answer is: quite a few. Here's some insight into this punishing endeavor.
There are precedents in healthcare to tethering financial compensation to body parts, as in the case with egg or sperm donation, and surrogacy. Are organs any different?
Not all vices are equally bad. In a perfect world, our kids never do anything stupid or rebellious. But we don't live in that kind of world, do we? The principle of harm reduction acknowledges that reality, which means that teen vapers are preferable to teen smokers.
FDA chairman Dr. Scott Gottlieb has warned us once again that sunscreen pills are nothing but a worthless supplement. But, is it possible that he is wrong on this one? Let's see what Mr. Melonhead has to say.
Anti-science activists continue to scramble to shore up their clients, who have become increasingly unnerved that we're pushing them back to the fringes where they belong. And then legitimate media linked to us as well.
Having cancer is bad enough, but modern medicine often converts this into more of a chronic problem. However, for some patients with the awful disease, it comes with a side dish of diabetes. Why is this the case?
A terrific story on college students and sleep deprivation was tucked inside the science section of the printed version of The New York Times. But online, it was the #1 trending story. Not just science story, but the newspaper's top story overall.
Rather than rehash the disclosure of conflicts that led to the downfall of the now-former Chief Medical Officer at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, consider how this episode reflects a more common problem of "entitled" powerful people. Here are two remedies that don't require investigations and can possibly help correct medical research's vacillating integrity dilemma.
A paper says up to 8,000 new antibiotic combinations could be ready for testing, but there is a big catch: It's called reality.
Many public and private locations have begun carrying injectable epinephrine. But with no generic form of the easiest kind of device, there have been complaints of price gouging. No more. The FDA has approved the first generic version of epinephrine auto-injector for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions.
U.S. public health agencies struggle to endorse an obvious solution to a true public health menace. Hopefully, the UK Parliament will provide a much-needed boost to the forces of common sense.
When we talk about cost and price transparency, medical devices are rarely mentioned. It represents about 5% of our healthcare spending, or roughly $120 billion in 2017. That's less than the $500 billion we spend on pharmaceuticals. But then as the old saying goes, "a billion here, a billion there, after a while you are talking about real money."
In the first federal study focusing on fast-food consumption, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 37 percent of American adults reported eating fast food within 24 hours of being asked. Nationwide, that translates to roughly 85 million adults visiting these establishments daily.
Without question, it was a fluke. A single-cell organism, only found in warm freshwater, entered a young man's nose and eventually ate at his brain tissue, leading to his death. While this is rare, is it smart – or simply alarmist – for others in similar situations to take preventative measures?
If you are concerned that we aren't wasting enough time in court with stupid lawsuits fear not. There's another one in the works about the label of what is little more than fizzy water with a little flavoring. The case was written up by Popular Science, but to a chemist, Unpopular Science would be more accurate.
The Environmental Protection Agency has extended registration for Dicamba – an herbicide commonly used to remove growing weeds, as well as Dicamba-tolerant crops – out to the end of 2020. Here's what that means.
The DEA, an arm of the Department of Justice, released a 184-page report claiming that prescription opioid analgesics is the drug class that's killing the most Americans. Huh? This sure seems strange. But a closer look suggests that the only thing strange is the manner in which that data is used in the report. The DEA spins and wins. Pain patients lose.
In an ill-advised Twitter ad, the candidate offers a teachable moment on the importance of not driving while distracted.
The prevalence of cigarette smoking among American adults is at an all-time low. Many media outlets decided to downplay or ignore this milestone public health achievement and instead scare people about vaping.
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