Mayor Bloomberg s ban on large sugary drinks set to go into effect on Tuesday, March 12th is not only applicable to soda, but may affect your morning coffee routine as well. And those restrictions are even more difficult to understand than the soda regulations, sorry to say.

For quite a while, ACSH has been skeptical to say the least about the scientific basis of the prevailing guidelines and studies about salt and salt intake, and here s another one to add to the list: Too much salt may trigger autoimmune diseases.

After launching campaigns against soda, salt and fast food, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is at it again with a new target ear buds. But unlike some of his pervasive and ill-advised forays into dictating our health behaviors, this time the Mayor has promulgated a productive campaign to save our youngsters hearing.

Home blood pressure monitoring programs demonstrated superiority to usual care for keeping hypertension in check, a randomized controlled trial found.
Led by Dr. David Magid from Kaiser Permanente Colorado, a team of researchers followed 348 hypertensive patients, half of whom used the American Heart Association s Heart 360 Program a free, online tool for tracking heart health. Users can upload blood pressure data from their home blood pressure machines and send it to their health care providers.

Gel manicures a manicure in which a coat of colored gel is applied to the nail and dried using UV light have been increasing in popularity, mostly because they do not chip and last twice as long as a regular manicure. But doing its best to create a health scare, the New York Post blares Manicure red alert on its front page today. DOC S SHOCK WARNING.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Dr. Thomas Frieden calls them nightmare bacteria and they are showing up in more and more U.S. hospitals.

A new study suggests that the life expectancy for some American women seems to be on the decline, specifically in rural areas in the south and the west.
The study, based on mortality rates in U.S. counties from 1992-1996 and 2002-2006, found that women age 75 and younger are dying at higher rates than previous years in nearly half of the nation's counties - many of them rural and in the South and West. For men however, life expectancy has held steady or improved in nearly all counties.

In a Dispatch article Monday, ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom excoriated a study that tried (and failed miserably) to link exposure to BPA with childhood asthma. Apparently, he has a bit more to say on this matter. You can read his typically mild-mannered and non-judgemental op-ed, Maybe the Worst Paper Ever? here.

A new study published in the journal Health Affairs found that the rate of Caesarean deliveries varied widely across hospitals and regions of the United States, from 7 percent of all births at the hospital with the lowest rate, to 70 percent of all births at the hospital with the highest rate.

A new study, published yesterday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggests that screening colonoscopy may markedly reduce the risk of developing advanced colon cancer.