Last week, Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, announced that 50 cancers would be added to a list of health conditions covered by a $4.3 billion fund for those who were exposed to carcinogenic dust following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Yesterday we covered the launch of a PLoS Medicine series critical of Big Food, and now it seems as though the American Medical Association (AMA) is jumping on the same bandwagon. At their annual meeting yesterday, the organization officially stated that taxing soda should be considered as a policy for raising funds toward anti-obesity programs.

Ah, summer. That time of year when the sun is shining, barbecues are fired up, and your favorite fruits and vegetables are finally ripe and available in bountiful supply. But before you head to the grocery store to enjoy these tasty treats, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) wants you to know that many of these delights are not safe to eat. That s because they re covered in dirty pesticides (gasp)!

On Tuesday, we discussed an article in The New York Times focusing on the increased risk of heart attack that HIV-positive patients face. In the Times piece, the writer discussed a study published last month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, pointing out that HIV patients are four-times more likely to experience a sudden heart attack, compared to those not infected with the virus.

Pneumococcal disease infects about 500,000 people each year in the U.S., killing about 25,000 of them. So, in 2010, when the FDA approved Pfizer s Prevnar 13, a vaccine that prevents pneumonia and other serious diseases caused by pneumococcus, for use in children between the ages of 6 weeks and 5 years, it represented a major advance in the prevention of infectious disease.

Yesterday, ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross appeared on The Laura Ingraham Show, a radio talk show streamed on hundreds of stations nationwide. The topic of discussion was the effects of inadequate sleep on American workers 30 percent of whom are not getting the recommended amount of 7 to 9 hours of shuteye per night.
Aside from work-related accidents and absenteeism, chronic sleep deprivation can also lead to an increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events, motor vehicular accidents, depression, and even weight gain.

ACSH staffers cringed while perusing the first fusillade of a three-week series launched by PLoS Medicine on what its editors call "Big Food." The series is introduced by an editorial that calls for greater public scrutiny of the role that the so-called multinational food and beverage industry plays in the obesity epidemic.

Genetically modified (GM) foods are okay with the American Medical Association (AMA). On Tuesday, the Association adopted a "trust but verify policy," which accepts that there is no proven health risk associated with GM foods or products derived from transgenic ingredients, but that each product should go through a pre-market safety approval process.

Dear Senators:

A recent study published in the Archives of Dermatology is giving smokers another reason to quit: cigarette smoking has been associated with an increased risk of a type of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham in England conducted a meta-analysis that included 25 observational studies and found that current smokers had a 50 percent increased risk of squamous cell skin cancer. Among those who had already kicked the habit, the increased risk of the disease was still present, but at a reduced rate of about 20 percent.