In September, this daily opportunity to listen in on ACSH staffers' conversations will be e-mailed to donors each morning. It will be available to the general public the next day.
You can become a donor at http://www.acsh.org/support/ or send a tax-deductible donation to:
American Council on Science and Health
1995 Broadway, 2nd floor
New York, NY 10023
For questions, please call Jeff Stier at 212-362-7044 x225 or e-mail Tara McTeague at McTeagueT[at]acsh.org.
--As August heats up, so does the desire to escape to sunny beaches and cool oceans. But along with waterfronts come the threat of mosquitoes and the diseases they may carry. In today's Wall Street Journal, Dr. Henry Miller suggests a way to combat mosquito-carried ailments. Miller, a member of ACSH's Board of Trustees, advocated in his op-ed using DDT to prevent West Nile Virus from spreading. ACSH has long endorsed the return of DDT as a pesticide, banned decades ago after Rachel Carson's legendary environmentalist book, Silent Spring. Last year, the World Health Organization announced its plan to re-integrate the use of DDT as a lifesaving intervention in the case of malaria.
--Because it's the summer before the presidential primaries, debate is heating up over the various Republican and Democratic candidates. Today's front-page story in the New York Times on former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is a telling example of temperatures rising. ACSH staffers find it unreasonable to use one anecdotal story to generalize about an entire public health issue, and Giuliani's quotes (and his critics) seem to be trying to do just that.
The article looks at Giuliani's statements that he spent as much if not more time in the ruins of Ground Zero as the cleanup workers and that he is also susceptible to any health risk they have encountered. In one appearance, he declared that he had been in the ruins "as often, if not more" than the cleanup workers who logged hundreds of hours there. Whether or not Giuliani or his critics are right about the exact time spent there, one person's health experiences in a situation should never be generalized. As ACSH's Todd Seavey said, "One man does not a statistical sample make."
Corrie Driebusch is a research intern at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
