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

Hear about the German guy who got arrested for getting selling forged vaccine cards to anti-vaxxers? That should be funny enough, right? Nope. ACSH goes the extra kilometer, as usual.

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.

Do you think too much pizza will make you fat, or the chemicals in the box? If you think it's the box, you probably read AlterNet instead of us. And we had more outreach last week

With no topic beyond reach of his scorn, Donald Trump takes a shot at the NFL, calling the game "too soft" for its attempts to protect players with rule changes. Meanwhile, a big thumbs up to another mogul, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for publicizing the vaccination of his infant daughter; and a sad, early goodbye to legendary rocker David Bowie, a one-time heavy smoker, who died at the age of 69.

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.

Very few have heard about this. It's over 100 years old and explains why bread smells so good and turns brown. But baking also produces a few chemicals of concern – or are they? Here you get a chemistry lesson! Whether you want one or not.

In July of 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the estimated number of cases in New York City suddenly plummeted. The city health commissioner soon needed police protection.
Until that July, the city had estimated that 400,000 New Yorkers carried the AIDS virus. Then the commissioner, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, reviewed the evidence and reduced the estimate to 200,000. He was promptly denounced by leaders of AIDS organizations and gay-rights groups, who accused him of lying to minimize the crisis.

To people in science, organic coffee always seemed a little silly, because you don't eat coffee beans any more than you eat the shell of a pineapple, and by the time you do get to the consumable part, whether or not the toxic pesticide on the plant was an organic one or a synthetic one has ceased to be relevant.

WScreen Shot 2014-01-23 at 1.20.11 PMhile we don t always agree with the FDA s actions, yesterday the agency resoundingly rejected two citizens petitions that asked the FDA to ban the use of aspartame as a food additive. Kudos to the FDA!

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.

What's worse? Getting health advice from an alternative medicine website advertising in a golf magazine or Dr. Oz? At ACSH these questions are par for the course.

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.

The discovery of silent H5N1 infections in unexpected populations, the emergence of new variants, and its potential to evolve into a human-to-human transmissible virus necessitates immediate and comprehensive public health responses.

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

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.

An unneeded solution is looking for a non-existent problem. It's one more illustration of the reality that all of U.S. public health policy on the so-called "prescription opioid crisis" is outright fraudulent.

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.

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.

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."

Many public health officials have called for mandatory vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The motivation for this policy is understandable, but forcing parents to immunize their kids emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. By incentivizing people to vaccinate and holding them legally accountable when they don't, we can preserve individual autonomy, maintain herd immunity and undermine the anti-vaccine movement.

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.

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.

The scientific publishing industry is thoroughly dishonest and corrupt, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the journal Science are now also a part of the problem. Here's a disturbing case in point.