Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today 6/14/12, "About Face (Eating)"
In 1985 Michael Hovey, an organic chemist at du Pont in Wilmington cooked up a batch of 3-methylfentanyl, an illegal narcotic that is one hundred thousand times stronger than morphine, in his lab, ushering in the modern era of so-called "designer drugs".

This week, two studies presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons examined the effects of smoking on joint replacements of the knee and the hip.

ACSH has long criticized those who have repeatedly called for reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a federal law that was passed in 1976 to regulate chemicals. And though numerous attempts have been made to get Congress to amend the act over the years primarily because anti-chemical activist groups such as NRDC thought it was not stringent enough their efforts have thus far not led to any changes.

In yet another controversial announcement, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is recommending that healthy postmenopausal women put away their vitamin D and calcium supplements, stating there s not enough evidence to demonstrate that either prevents bone fractures.

Creating designer drugs is an insidiously clever business, and as chemists prepare new street drugs, the results can be disastrous. That s the thrust of a recent blog post by ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom for Medical Progress Today.
Lately in the news, you may have heard about a few cases in which some deranged folks have started eating the flesh off of the face of another person. Though grotesque and creepy, Dr. Bloom explains how such events are largely due to the powerful psychotropic effects of some street drugs.

Diesel exhaust is linked to an increased risk of lung and bladder cancer, according to a report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The latest assessment reclassifies diesel exhaust from probably carcinogenic a categorization the group made in 1988 to level I, carcinogenic" to humans.

ACSH is proud to announce that the National Post s annual Junk Science Week highlighted three items we recently covered in Dispatch: the proposed Bloomberg soda ban; the lack of association between chemicals and breast cancer; and the alarmist scare story on artificial sweeteners in yesterday s The New York Times.
We re happy to contribute to Junk Science Week, as we ve done over years past as well.

For many years now, ACSH has been reminding folks of the importance of vaccines. And though we constantly come across blogs and celebrities (e.g. Jenny McCarthy) who warn parents about the alleged dangers of getting their kids immunized, we were pleased to read Courtney Wheeler s piece on the 7 Real-Life Consequences of Refusing Vaccines.

Dr. Ruth Kava in the Financial Post
Junk Science Week: CT scans are the real risk, not plastics

Dr. Elizabeth Whelan in the Financial Post
Junk Science Week: Artificial science