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The federal government has proposed a nationwide vaccine mandate. It's a terrible idea.

It s summer time and the living s easy. Time to fire up the BBQ, pull the summer clothes down from the attic (hopefully they still fit) and relax around the pool and if we are talking pools, than we also have to talk about chlorine.
Chlorine and pools go hand in hand. Any pool owner will tell you that keeping your chlorine levels (a

Another study highlights the overlap between genetic engineering in medicine and agriculture, offering another example of why the anti-GMO movement is losing its cultural relevance.

Until recently, little was known about the safety of COVID vaccines for pregnant women. We have much more to learn, but the preliminary evidence now coming in is reassuring.

As the COVID pandemic moves further into our rearview mirrors, questions have been raised about a more prolonged manifestation of COVID, Long COVID. Now, there seems to be a concern about more prolonged symptoms from the COVID vaccines; we can call it Long Vax. What do we know and don’t know?

California just paused its plans for a statewide COVID-19 vaccine mandate. There wasn't an ounce of scientific evidence to support this proposal and enough opposition to halt the legislation, at least until after the upcoming elections. There's an important lesson here for policymakers.

As we reported last month, a recent federal appeals court decision may have a dramatic impact on the Food and Drug Administration's complex drug approval process. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled (by a 2-to-1 vote) that pharmaceutical companies have a free-speech right to promote approved drugs for uses that are "off-label," such as using an anti-epilepsy drug to control appetite and weight.

A British microbiologist found that some beard bacteria contains anti-adhesion molecules, which prevent bacterial binding to surfaces. That means that hipster beards may harbor bacteria capable of killing drug-resistant bacteria.

This allergy test, a sometimes unpleasant childhood right of passage, may be a thing of the past someday. New research shows that a urine test can determine if a person has an allergy to a specific substance.

An old wives tale makes a comeback: Cranberry juice

Dr. A. Zuger's NYTimes column presents an excellent discussion of penicillin allergies, both real, exaggerated, and severe and how to deal with them.

You d have to be living under a rock to miss the news that antibiotic resistance is a major public health problem that threatens to set us back to square one in terms of treating bacterial infections. Many practices have been implicated as part of the problem, but there's something new for that list: travel.

Harm reduction has been an effective tool in relieving the plight of drug addicts who are at an increased risk of contracting severe infections especially hepatitis and HIV, but also drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA as a result of using contaminated shared needles.

Yesterday we reported on the alarming rise in the incidence of C. difficile (Clostridium difficile) bacterial infections and deaths due to increases in both its prevalence and its antibiotic resistance. The development and discovery of new antibiotic drugs would help counter the problem, but pharmaceutical companies are largely unmotivated to enter this research arena, mainly because investing in such drugs is not profitable.

Leeches used to be used as a medical cure-all, but today are of course almost entirely discredited. It’s worth wondering how many other medical tests — from the prostate-specific antigen to routine mammography — will one day be relegated to the dust bin of history. The latest exam to undergo scrutiny are routine pelvic exams [...]
The post Routine pelvic exams may be harming women appeared first on Health & Science Dispatch.

Shane Ellison, the self-proclaimed "People's Chemist," has a lot to say about chemistry, drugs, and vaccines. Let's see if he knows what he's talking about.

Adding HPV (human papillomavirus) screening to conventional Pap tests appears to significantly improve the early detection of precancerous cervical abnormalities and reduce the rate of subsequent cervical cancer, according to a new study in The Lancet Oncology.

With the recent discovery of polymyxin-resistant infection here in the U.S., there's a renewed pledge among drug developers and the government to incentivize research for developing new antibiotics, previously a seemingly abandoned effort.

The views of Dr. Merrit, a physician, on COVID-19’s origin story, biologic effects, and organized medicine’s response is classic misdirection and misinformation. It is time to debunk the distortions that cast more shadow than light.

As the horror known as the coronavirus tightens its grip on the world, and a vaccine is years away, our best hope is an antiviral drug that minimizes the damage caused by coronavirus replication. New data on favipiravir, a repurposed drug originally discovered in Japan, looks promising in trials in China. But nothing is ever straightforward in drug discovery -- and that is no different here. Here's a summary of the new findings.

When it comes to finding new antibiotics, no place is too weird to look. Three separate teams of researchers have identified potentially useful antibiotics from some of the strangest places imaginable: Sponges, sea snails, and marine worms.

As overused as the expression you can t make this up is, sometimes there is simply no other phrase that can do the trick. You decide.
Yesterday, it was Chinese dietary supplements that were in the news. Today it s spices from India. And if there is a better way to illustrate how badly the FDA s hands are tied while trying to protect people from substances they should not be consuming, it isn t obvious.

Microbiologists have long known that the kitchen is an incredibly fertile field for bacterial growth — and a prime source is the kitchen sponge. A recent study of sponges found that even those that are "cleaned" by their users provide a soup of bacteria — some of which are pathogenic.

A story that's gone viral (again) claims that McDonald's touchscreen menus are fecally tainted. Is it true? No. The global headlines saying otherwise are total lies. So, on what basis are these folks making that ridiculous claim?

Despite evidence that all the approved COVID-19 shots drastically cut the risk of transmission, the CDC insists that vaccinated individuals still have to mask up and keep their distance. This policy may do more harm than good as we try to further boost vaccine uptake.