Undetected, Unmeasured Disaster
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Friday, November 19, 2004
When regulators began looking for traces of potentially-harmful substances to ban a half-century ago, scientists were capable of finding traces as small as parts per million.  Unfortunately, activists continue to panic -- and make news -- each time science improves our ability to detect minuscule traces, even if there's no new evidence these smaller and smaller traces can harm us.  Now that we can detect parts per quintillion, it isn't hard to find traces of virtually any substance on   Read Full >>

Facts Versus Fears per FactsAndFears
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Here at the American Council on Science and Health, we're releasing the fourth edition of our handy tome Facts Versus Fears (which inspired the name of our website, FactsAndFears).  The booklet surveys the greatest unfounded health scares of the past five decades, from the "Cranberry Scare" of 1959 to current paranoia over PCBs in farmed salmon and thimerosal in vaccines.  In   Read Full >>

Delusions of Personhood: Philosophy and Stem Cells (with links to Whelan/Miller and Ponnuru arguments)
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review wrote a September 24 TechCentralStation.com piece, "Delusions of Moderation," attacking embryonic stem cell (ESC) research.  He criticized ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan and ACSH Director Dr. Henry Miller for their earlier Read Full >>

Yawn of the Dead (A Reflection on Smoking)
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Shaun of the Dead, the funniest movie of the year so far (since the momentous marionette parody Team America has not yet opened), depicts a boring, underachieving British man named Shaun going on with his humdrum life, oblivious to the monstrous army of the walking dead that is taking over the world all around him.  The juxtapositions as he walks to the local store,   Read Full >>

Ad Hominem and Who-Funds-'Em
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Monday, August 9, 2004
I should be receiving a massive salary from Greenpeace and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  But let me explain. Volokh.com notes that the American Cancer Society accuses a Cato Institute expert of opposing tobacco regulation in part because he has received money from the tobacco company Altria (Philip Morris) — but the American Cancer   Read Full >>

Celebs and Bigwigs Not Founts of Science Wisdom
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Monday, July 12, 2004
Celebrity-worship and deference to authority sometimes overcome people's ability to think scientifically and rationally.  ACSH's Jeff Stier has written about how celebrities influence research funding, for instance.  Celebrity and authority can also be used to sell ideas the public wouldn't otherwise accept. •Tom Cruise is promoting a chain of "detox" centers for people exposed to the dust of the   Read Full >>

Rules for the Discriminating Risk-Taker
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Tuesday, June 15, 2004
The brain hungers to place things in simple categories: good for you, bad for you...safe, risky.  But the stomach hungers for French fries, salmon, meat substitutes, and other things that have been hastily labeled "bad" by activists, so the brain has some work to do: putting the activists' warnings (about food and other things) in context, weighing those tiny or imagined risks against other risks from everyday life.  Ten lessons for the discriminating risk-assessor: 1. All   Read Full >>

Ten Odd Health Stories
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Tuesday, June 8, 2004
The first half of 2004 has brought some weird health news.  Whether good, bad, or ambiguous, these items are all worth noting: 1. Measures of pesticide exposure aren't always so empirical.  Our friends at http://NutritionNewsFocus.com noted in their May 25 e-bulletin that a study in the April 2004 issue of Cancer   Read Full >>

Drug Reimportation Ad Absurdum
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Economists told a Department of Health and Human Services panel on April 27 that allowing reimportation from Canada of pharmaceuticals — so that they can be purchased by Americans at the low prices mandated by Canadian — would hurt the research and development of new drugs in the lung run. That's not surprising, since price controls (which are what we would really be importing from Canada) undermine profit, making it less worthwhile for companies to invest in producing products in the first   Read Full >>

Earth Day Follies: Love Canal
By Todd Seavey
Publication Date : Thursday, April 22, 2004
At today's Earth Day celebrations, environmentalists will likely point to the clean-up of the toxic waste dump at New York's Love Canal as one of their biggest victories. But was there really a terrible environmental menace to combat at Love Canal in the first place? When federal officials announced the completion of the clean-up last month, the New York Times called it the end of a "toxic horror" that had burned children and pets and caused birth defects and miscarriages. Most scientists who   Read Full >>