Coca-Cola isn t taking the blame for America s obesity epidemic lying down. The world s biggest beverage company unveiled a new ad campaign yesterday that is airing on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC highlighting its low- and no-calorie drinks, marketing smaller servings of its beverages, and encouraging physical fitness. Entitled Coming Together, the ads encourage everyone to be careful about watching their weight.

Why are people so afraid of fracking? Regulators familiar with the technology seem positively serene about hydraulic fracturing, National Review Online columnist Deroy Murdock writes. In countering the hysteria stirred up by activists, Murdock thoroughly and systematically dismantles every argument against fracking.

New recommendations from the American Cancer Society say that older current or former heavy smokers may want to talk to their physician about getting a yearly low-dose CT scan (also called spiral CT scans) of the chest to help detect lung cancer.

With the flu season getting off to a fierce start, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo followed Massachusetts lead in declaring a public health emergency Saturday, suspending a state law that allows pharmacists to vaccinate only adults against influenza. But drug stores are proving reluctant to offer flu shots to kids.

A new diabetes drug called canagliflozin has been approved by a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel. The drug, developed by Johnson & Johnson, acts to lower blood sugar by increasing the excretion rate of sugar via the kidneys into the urine of patients with Type 2 diabetes. This is a new means of controlling blood sugar the majority of other diabetes drugs work by affecting the supply or use of insulin.

In an attempt to crack down on what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg calls a citywide and national epidemic of prescription drug abuse, prescription painkillers will be restricted in the emergency rooms of New York City s 11 public hospitals. Under this new policy, public hospital patients will not be able to get more than three days worth of narcotic painkillers such as Vicodin and Percocet.

Americans live shorter lives and are in generally worse health than citizens of other wealthy nations, according to an extensive report released Wednesday by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

The European Union Health Commission is out with a new set of rules proposing more regulations on e-cigarettes and tightening the absurd ban on snus which ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross is doing his best to counter in the popular press.

The World Health Organization predicts that if current trends continue, the likely toll of tobacco will amount to one-billion lives cut short worldwide. By tobacco, however, anyone with knowledge of the spectrum of tobacco-related disease knows it s the inhalation of cigarette smoke hundreds of thousands of times over decades that would be responsible if that catastrophic prediction comes to pass the relative harm of non-combustible tobacco and nicotine-delivery products is in the order of one percent that of smoking.

This flu season is turning out to be a whopper. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino on Wednesday declared a public health emergency after city residents came down with 700 confirmed cases 10 times more than all of last season.