CBS News reported yesterday morning that plastic and wooden pallets used for transporting food are deemed unsanitary and implicated in the contamination of food by the E. coli and Listeria bacteria.
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It seems that neither advanced video games nor the allure of Facebook are capable of satiating teenage boredom any longer, which explains why some have found alternative and novel forms of amusement. For instance, 19-year-old Melissa Fontaine chooses to entertain her and a group of rambunctious rugby players by pulling her eyelids open and allowing shots of vodka to be poured into her left eye.
A study published in the journal Nature Medicine claims that a vaccine appears to have prevented breast cancer in lab mice. The mice, genetically prone to develop breast cancer, were injected with a vaccine designed to provoke an immune response to a protein found in most breast tumors. None of the mice immunized with the vaccine developed breast cancer, compared to the control group in which every mouse developed breast cancer.
ACSH trustees Dr. Henry I. Miller, a Hoover Institution fellow, and James E. Enstrom, a professor at UCLA School of Public Health, contributed an op-ed yesterday in Forbes.com condemning California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations on diesel trucks and other vehicles, which are said to emit a form of air pollution known as diesel particulate matter.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a stakeholders phone conference announcing a draft document on the toxicology of formaldehyde inhalation and exposure.
This Friday, data from 4,000 patients across 11 failed Alzheimer s drug clinical trials will be publicly available for a group of major pharmaceutical companies who have agreed to collaborate and pool information in order to better understand how the disease progresses.
The food industry has been substituting trans-fat with better-for-you fats, HealthDay reports , picking up an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found most manufacturers and restaurants weren t simply replacing trans-fat with saturated fat, as some had feared they would.
A recent meta-analysis, which combines and analyzes the results of multiple studies, casts doubt on the use of statins to reduce the risk of death in patients without heart problems but who have an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Statins are drug therapies that reduce blood cholesterol levels and have effectively reduced further complications in patients who have already experienced heart disease.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a lawsuit against the FDA on Tuesday for what it deems the agency’s unsatisfactory regulation of BPA.
Maintaining that the NRDC suit is simply media grandstanding, ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan points out that the “FDA has studied BPA through and through and has decided that it is safe enough to remain on the market. This isn’t a decision they made arbitrarily or capriciously — it was based on decades’ worth of scientific data.”
Scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a study in the Journal of American Medical Association documenting a correlation between elevated blood levels of vitamin B6 and methionine, an amino acid, and a reduced risk of lung cancer in smokers, former smokers and never-smokers.
It’s the 12th annual Junk Science Week in Canada, and the Financial Post is calling for science, not politics, to determine the merit behind salt reduction policies. Dr. David McCarron, visiting professor at the University of California, Davis and executive director of Shaping America’s Youth, writes that human physiology already dictates our salt intake:
Despite its preventability via vaccination and booster shots, whooping cough has become an epidemic in California. There have been 910 cases recorded of the highly infectious disease as of June 15. So far, five babies all Latino under the age of 3 have died from whooping cough in 2010, which might be attributed to a lack of information on inoculation in the state s Central Valley, a region comprised of a high Latino agricultural worker population.
Perhaps Dan Mitchell was watching ACSH's Jeff Stier on yesterday s CNBC segment covering the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) threat to sue McDonalds over Happy Meal toys when he observed that CSPI s tactics were a bit much in Slate's The Big Money.
According to Stephen Gardner, CSPI s litigation director, McDonald s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children.
Upon discovering that the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the foremost expert organization on the causes of cancer, posted the recently released “President’s Cancer Panel” report on their website, ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan expressed her discontent in a letter:
The FDA seems poised to approve a new morning-after pill, one which is effective for up to five days after unprotected sex, two days longer than the currently available Plan B. French drugmaker HRA Pharma has asked permission to sell Ella in the US, the brand name for the chemical ulipristal.
ACSH staffers were pleased to learn the FDA has approved a new HIV combination assay that allows earlier detection of HIV and AIDS. Current HIV tests have a “window period” of two to eight weeks during which time a newly-infected person can test negative for the disease. Abbot Laboratories’ new test cuts seven to 20 days from that window period.
During her confirmation hearings yesterday, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was questioned by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on an issue near and dear to ACSH: Does the U.S. government have the authority to tell the American public what they can and cannot eat?
Kagan responded, The question of whether it s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it s constitutional.
Courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they re senseless, continued Kagan.
ACSH is proud to announce once again that the fruits of our labor in tackling junk science taste sweeter than ever.
An FDA advisory panel has unanimously rejected Boehringer Ingelheim s application for flibanserin, a failed anti-depressant drug they proposed to use as a treatment for reduced sexual desire in women. The panel argued that the research was not robust enough to justify the risks but encouraged the company to further their research efforts.
ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross greeted staff this morning with a spirited Buon giorno! upon his return from the July 2-7 Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) conference series in Turin, Italy during which ACSH hosted a presentation on Reducing the toll of smoking-related disease and death: the case for tobacco harm reduction. The three keynote speakers included Karl-Olov Fagerstrom, Karl Erik Lund, and Lars Ramstrom world-renowned science and policy experts on tobacco and nicotine.
Yesterday we commented on Mayor Michael Bloomberg s endorsement of a plan to ban smoking in parks and beaches based in part on a New York City-funded study in 2009 claiming that 57 percent of non-smoking New York City adults, compared to 45 percent nationally, tested positive for the presence of cotinine, a marker for nicotine exposure.
With due diligence, ACSH s Jeff Stier found the original publication of the cited study which states:
The U.S. Apple Association (USApple), a national trade association representing all divisions of the apple industry, is advising Alzheimer’s patients to drink one, 8-ounce glass of apple juice per day in order to improve their mood and behavior. According to a clinical trial of 21 Alzheimer patients between the ages of 72 to 93, an intake of two, 4-ounce servings of apple juice daily for one month improved anxiety, apathy, agitation, depression and delusions.
ACSH’s Jeff Stier testified today at the Food and Drug Administration's Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC), which began meeting yesterday in Gaithersburg, Md. At the conference, TPSAC is discussing the possibility of proscribing the use of menthol in cigarettes. His testimony was based on ACSH’s position paper on mentholated cigarettes.
ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan lost a night of sleep on Friday reading Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice (Simon & Schuster, 2009), which depicts the story of a Harvard professor who at age 50 is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. After reading such a book, Dr. Whelan says, you cannot help but become interested in Alzheimer’s research, which happened to have made the front page of Saturday’s New York Times.
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