Last year, the U.S. saw 222 measles cases the highest number since 1996, a statistic that public health officials are now using to remind kids and adults to get vaccinated. And because 200 of the identified cases were imported from abroad and from countries one might not immediately associate with the disease, including France and Italy the latest warning is especially important to those traveling.

A surprising one in five drug recalls of the most serious type (Class I) were never formally announced or communicated to doctors by the FDA, according to the results of a report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The agency has two systems in place the Recall Alert System and Medwatch that it uses to send out notifications to doctors and patients about drug recalls and, while recalls may vary in their degree of danger, Class I recalls are reserved for those drugs that, if taken, have the potential to cause serious adverse health consequences or death.

Yesterday we expressed our amazement that The New York Post would run an editorial supporting Mayor Bloomberg s proposed ban on sugary beverages larger than 16 ounces. Today we were shocked again to see that The Post published a letter to the editor by renowned anti-food industry activist Dr.

When folks here at ACSH hear the term cancer phobia, we instinctively assume it means the pervasive fear that exposure to certain chemicals or environmental factors will undoubtedly increase one s risk of cancer. Yet in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, science journalist David Ropeik uses the label in quite a different way: He describes the sense of doom that many patients experience upon receiving a cancer diagnosis, or simply when they hear the word cancer.

Welcome news to women with so-called triple-negative breast cancer a type of breast cancer more likely to resist commonly-used treatments: According to a new guidance issued this week by the FDA, pharmaceutical companies will now be allowed to test their cancer drugs on these patients before they undergo surgery.

For quite a while now, ACSH has been skeptical to say the least about the scientific basis of the prevailing federal dietary guidelines about salt intake. There is simply insufficient evidence to support the population-wide benefits of a low-salt diet (no more than 2,300 mg of sodium per day) and recent research has even suggested that such a diet could be harmful.

In Dispatch, we frequently cover the latest findings on screenings for a variety of health conditions. Annual EKG's, Pap smears, and prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests have all come under scrutiny within the past year, with the latest research advising far fewer of them. More often than not, that research shows that screening too often is not only unnecessary, but also costly and potentially even harmful.

Last week, we took note of the rarity of ACSH's opinion coinciding with that of The New York Times: We both agreed that, as The Times editorial put it, Bloomberg's proposed sales limitation on sugary beverages was "A Ban Too Far."So we were even more surprised to note that The New York

A recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had us rolling our eyes at its insistence that women who replaced sugar-sweetened beverages and fruit juices with water had a lower incidence of type 2 diabetes. While we suspected the study of being another data dredge of the over 82,000 women in the Harvard School of Public Health s Nurses' Health Study II, we called upon ACSH scientific advisor and statistician Dr.

Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today 6/4/12
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