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The American Council on Science and Health has been fighting chemophobia since its inception in 1978. Unfortunately the advent of the Internet, while providing much valid information, has also become a venue of inaccurate and fear-mongering sites. Thus, we were more than pleased to discover a blog on the website of Scientific American by chemistry [...]
The post Blog hits the right note on chemophobia appeared first on Health & Science Dispatch.

CVS just sent out a mass email patting itself on the back because the pharmacy chain no longer sells cigarettes. That's fine and good. But here's some of the other junk they sell.

New research debunks the notion that chronotype is a binary choice between "morning people" and "night owls." It also shows that a substantial number of people, if not an outright majority, are not energetic in the morning. It's time to end the tyranny of early birds.

At American Thinker, Dr. John Dunn lauds American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisor Dr. Frank Schnell, former toxicologist for the U.S. government, and his concern that the EPA long ago ran out of problems to solve, so they have been manufacturing new ones by redefining hazards until they cover something.

In this organic-crazed world, preservatives are essentially equated with deadly cyanide in terms of human harm. But, when you examine things a little more closely, the scare doesn't match reality. And it shouldn't. Most preservatives occur naturally in your diet, or in your body.

Veteran New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fancies himself an expert in chemistry and toxicology. Chemists and toxicologists disagree.

As the COVID-19 vaccines roll out, the anti-vaxxers have been increasingly more militant in their misinformation campaigns, actively and effectively dissuading vaccine uptake. The question becomes what can we do about this activity which harms us all? 

With a Prop 65 warning on glyphosate, environmentalists outmaneuvered the science community once again.

A Noveber 11, 2005 article by Alicia Colon in the New York Sun described the ACSH presentation of the 2005 Sound Science Award to Michael Crichton:

If I told you that I knew how to find the cause of childhood leukemia, you might think I was either a genius or Erin Brockovich. If I further told you that we could attribute this cruel disease to products of multinational chemical corporations, companies that do millions of dollars of business with the U.S. Navy, or to underground nuclear tests, you might refer me to some eager lawyers.

The Bill Moyers PBS show NOW got one important thing right about genetically-modified crops. "There's no scientific evidence that eating these ingredients hurts our health," says narrator Mark Schapiro in the segment "Seeds of Conflict," which aired earlier this month. Even Moyers' introduction muted the usual "Frankenstein foods" tone of such stories, contrasting "the surprises of nature" with "the precision of science."

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve in Year 2, so too does ACSH's need to cover it as comprehensively and accurately as possible. Further, we're gratified and appreciative to USA Today, which for the second time in three weeks published one of our Op-Ed columns, allowing another of ACSH's public-health messages to reach millions of Americans. This premier placement highlights the varied media exposure ACSH received during the month of February.

Rarely does a week go by without some rather strange stories emerging about science and medicine. This past week was no exception.

Jonel Aleccia of NBC News took on a rather unpleasant subject norovirus (aka the stomach flu or the winter vomiting bug) in his recent article.
Although it is an intriguing topic, and dispels some myths, the overall message that if you simply avoid eating at restaurants (especially the salad bars) you will dodge this hideous infection is misleading.

Friday's Chicago Tribune ran an interesting story on how quality control problems at many dietary supplement manufacturing plants were causing unsafe products that were making people sick.
Interesting, yes, but they completely missed the point.
The article mentioned a few cases, including a factory where a half of a rat found next to a scoop used to fill containers with protein powder. This puzzled me, since I cannot imagine how a half of a rat could possibly climb all the way up a table.

A recent paper in JAMA Internal Medicine was essentially little more than a hit piece on physicians. The authors claim that doctors will write prescriptions for more expensive drugs if they attend a seminar about that drug, and get a cheap meal. But the only thing cheap here is the standards of the authors. Their paper is a travesty.

It's the season for Top 10 lists. The challenge, as usual, is to narrow down all the junk science we debunked this year to just the 10 best (or is that worst?) stories. It would be far easier to create a Top 100 list.

The same mRNA technology that gave us effective COVID-19 vaccines could yield a new generation of highly protective seasonal flu shots. When will we see these upgraded influenza vaccines? Perhaps sooner than you think.

ACSH has not published a study on this topic, but it took Google 0.17 seconds to come up with this:
Results 1 - 30 of about 156 related articles. Search took 0.17 seconds.

No Link Between Cell Phone Use and Brain Tumors, StudyMedical News Today, UKA new study has found no link between use of cell phones and the risk of developing a brain tumor. The study is published in the ...

Methanol sounds scary but fear evaporates quickly when people find that even if you consume nothing but aspartame all day, you will get about half the methanol that's in a banana. Yet charlatans continue to claim artificial sweeteners will give you cancer.

When it comes to environmental politics, history and improved scientific understanding often fail to inform. And according to guest writer Angela Logomasini, an author and Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, alarmism and irrationality are prominent in the current debate involving flame retardant chemicals.

FDA Panics
According to the Associated Press, “[FDA] officials urged pediatricians Monday to temporarily stop using one of two vaccines against a leading cause of diarrhea in babies, after discovering that doses of GlaxoSmithKline’s Rotarix were contaminated with bits of an apparently benign pig virus."

How does frequent social media use impact our mental health? A recent study attempted to pinpoint the effects of spending hours on Twitter and Facebook, but the inherent difficulty in analyzing human behavior limits our ability to find a precise answer.

One religious group forecast an apocalypse a few weeks ago. They used the Bible as its source. More recently, a newer religion warned of their apocalypse. But those followers cited Science magazine. 

In 2015, the American Council on Science and Health joined every reputable science body in being critical of yet another International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monograph. In recent years they had become prone to selectively choosing studies to include in their analyses, almost as if they predetermined a conclusion and then found studies to match it.