While the American Heart Association (AHA) and other prominent public figures (most notably, Mayor Michael Bloomberg) are calling on Americans to restrict their sodium intake, new evidence is suggesting that such recommendations may actually be not only without merit, but harmful.

Nearly 67 million Americans are living with hypertension, according to the latest estimates from the CDC, and nearly half of those people do not have their condition under control. Those are the dismal findings published in a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that was based on 2003-2010 data obtained from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Ten years after sequencing the human genome, scientists are now beginning to more accurately uncover how our genes and the DNA comprising them really function. In a series of new articles published across the spectrum of scientific journals, researchers working on the ENCODE project are describing their revelatory findings and discussing how they will contribute to our greater understanding of the human genome.

In keeping with its annual tradition, the New York Department of Health is launching this year s new smoking cessation campaign, called Suffering Every Minute. As previous campaigns have done, this one will include TV, internet, and print ads warning people of the dangers of cigarettes by emphasizing the suffering that smoking causes.

Josh Bloom, The New York Post September 5, 2012 , "The coming gonorrhea epidemic"
Gonorrhea is becoming untreatable. This common and potentially serious sexually transmitted disease was once easily cured. But now, of the 50 antibiotics once used to treat the infection, only one drug works and just barely.

More evidence that, if you re going to smoke (which we don t recommend), you shouldn t do it around your kids: A study published in The Journal of Pediatrics has found that children exposed to second-hand smoke at home are more likely to have serious complications when they come down with the flu.

Budesonide, an anti-inflammatory steroid found in Rhinocort and Pulmicort, has been used for decades to treat asthma. But, like all steroids, it has side effects. Over 10 years ago, researchers noted that children taking the drug were about half an inch shorter than children on other treatments. Now, a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that this effect may be permanent.

Long before antibiotics were developed, tuberculosis patients were often sent to sanatoriums, where treatment included soaking for hours in the sun. As treatments go, it was far inferior to the antibiotics that were eventually developed. However, new research suggests that the effects of all that sunlight on TB patients shouldn t be dismissed.

Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections have become a serious problem and, as ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom points out in his latest op-ed in the New York Post, they are no longer limited to the hospital: Out of the 50 antibiotics once used to treat gonorrhea, only one remains effective (and barely that). But as serious as antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is, it represents a larger-scale problem:

For years now, the organic food industry has staked its business on the idea that organic means healthier. And for just as long, ACSH has been saying that the claim is false: There are no nutritional or safety differences between foods produced according to organic standards and those produced by means of conventional agricultural methods. Now, a study appearing in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine provides evidence against the common equation of organic with healthier.