Shire PLC is withdrawing its low-blood pressure drug ProAmatine from the market following demands from the FDA for additional clinical tests.
Search
The Associated Press predicts that China s commitment to ban smoking in all public indoor facilities by January 2011 will go up in a puff of smoke. Unlike the U.S., China which suffers at least one million smoking-related deaths annually ratified a World Health Organization anti-tobacco treaty requiring public places to go smoke-free. Smoking is more deeply entrenched in Chinese culture than in the U.S., with tobacco companies sponsoring Chinese schools.
International supermodel by day and self-styled public health expert by night, Gisele Bundchen provides new moms with controversial advice in her latest interview with Harper s Bazaar UK: Some people here think they don t have to breastfeed, and I think, Are you going to give chemical food to your child when they are so little?
Mental illness among college students is on the rise, the LA Times reports, based on data presented at the American Psychological Association s annual meeting in San Diego.
In a small, preliminary study, magnetic resonance imaging scans of the brain have been used to reliably detect autism, British researchers report in the most recent Journal of Neuroscience.
Amid one of the largest egg recalls in U.S. history, some food-safety advocates are criticizing the FDA’s decision not to include mandatory hen vaccinations against salmonella in the agency’s new egg safety rules. After a similar salmonella outbreak in the 1990s, Britain encouraged farmers to inoculate their hens, and last year saw just 581 cases of salmonella poisoning — a 96 percent drop from 1997.
While electronic cigarettes are nothing new to Dispatch readers, they just today made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. The paper reports that e-cigarette companies argue they cannot afford the clinical trials the FDA wants to require for approval and warn that they will be forced to go out of business if the FDA gets its way.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reaffirmed Friday a conclusion reached long ago by scientists, upholding a decision that there is no link between autism and vaccines.
The MMR vaccine isn’t the only shot under fire: The European Medicines Agency (EMEA) is investigating GlaxoSmithKline’s “swine flu” (H1N1) vaccine Pandemrix to determine if it’s linked to a higher risk of developing narcolepsy after 27 cases of the sleep disorder were reported in Sweden and Finland. While the reported narcolepsy cases occurred soon after the patients received the Pandemrix shot, the EMEA emphasizes that the cause of narcolepsy is still unknown.
Bulgaria and Romania, the two poorest nations in the European Union, tried to bolster revenue by increasing excise taxes on cigarettes — with Bulgaria even reversing a national ban on smoking in cafes and restaurants. But their cigarette tax revenue, which accounted for approximately 10 percent of Bulgaria’s revenue last year, has actually decreased by almost a third so far, since smuggling cheaper cigarettes from neighboring countries has created a growing black market.
In the Reproductive Risk Factors for Incontinence Study at Kaiser (RRISK), researchers found that mothers who never breast-fed were nearly at double the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes (T2D) compared to women who had never had children after studying 2,233 women — 1,828 of whom were mothers — between the ages of 40 to 78 in California.
Widely used dental sealants contain substances that can degrade into Bisphenol A (BPA), a study in the latest issue of Pediatrics concludes.
Wikpedia defines data dredging as “the inappropriate (sometimes deliberately so) use of data mining to uncover misleading relationships in data. These relationships may be valid within the test set but have no statistical significance in the wider population.”
Look for a big advertising campaign beginning a week from Monday about a new all-“natural” lemon-lime soda. PepsiCo is eliminating “Sierra Mist” in favor of “Sierra Mist Natural”, which will be sweetened with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, Advertising Age reports.
Committed cigarette smokers demonstrate that where there’s a will, there’s a way. In order to continue smoking but also circumvent the recent tax hikes on cigarettes, people have come up with a novel solution: roll-your-own cigarette machines. Found in about 150 tobacco outlets in 20 states, these machines produce a carton of cigarettes in about eight minutes and cost about $21, which explains why people wait up to an hour on some days to use this service.
ACSH trustee Dr. James Enstrom is still at the University of California at Los Angeles, despite an earlier notice that his last day would be Monday, Aug. 30. As you may recall, Dr.
The California Legislature has approved a bill aimed at limiting radiation exposure, following reports that hundreds of patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and three other hospitals were accidentally overdosed during CT brain scans. The measure requires that radiation dosage levels are recorded on the scanned image and patient’s health record, as well as given to the patient, their physician and the California Department of Health.
After four decades of declines, the U.S. smoking rate appears to have plateaued, the CDC reports.
Following our article in Dispatch yesterday on an award to be named in honor of Dr. Frances Kelsey, the FDA official who kept thalidomide off the market in the U.S., we heard from two of our advisors questioning just how heroic her actions were.
Brad Rodu writes:
Following the publication of her piece in National Review Online yesterday on the rise in malaria deaths caused by a ban on DDT, Seattle radio host David Bowes invited ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan to speak further on the topic last night on his show. During the interview, Bowes played a song written and performed by Malvina Reynolds titled “DDT on My Brain,” which was released in 1969. Here is just a sampling of the lyrics:
After the American Heart Association came out with a strong statement against the use of smokeless tobacco as a smoking cessation aid, Dr. Gilbert Ross sent them this letter on Sept. 23:
Re: Piano et al, "Smokeless Tobacco Products and CVD"
Increasing the tax on alcohol could make us all healthier by reducing drunk-driving deaths, cutting the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and lowering violence and crime, a new meta-analysis claims.
New proposals to tax sugary beverages and create stricter regulatory policies for restaurants are unlikely to reduce obesity, according to economic analyses published in the Cato Institute’s current issue of Regulation, something ACSH has been saying all along.
Pagination
ACSH relies on donors like you. If you enjoy our work, please contribute.
Make your tax-deductible gift today!