Since 1994, new and expecting parents have been told to put their babies Back to Sleep. This pithy public health campaign, which emphasized that the safest way to put babies to bed is on their backs, has helped reduce the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by over 50 percent in 10 years. But now this salutary decline in mortality rate has plateaued, according to Dr. Henry Krous, director of Pathology Research at Rady Children s Hospital in San Diego and author of a recent study on SIDS.

The obesity epidemic has moved to the forefront of public health concerns, given that it s a major contributor to diabetes, heart disease, and other adverse health conditions. Yet for people who find it impossible to lose their excess weight, there still remains a paucity of successful treatment options, especially in the pharmaceutical sector. That s not to say, however, that drug companies aren t trying to create weight-loss medications in fact, there are currently three such drugs stuck in the all too familiar limbo of the FDA approval process.

When it comes to dispensing inaccurate information about the Plan B One-Step morning after pill, many pharmacies are guilty as charged. In a rather disconcerting new study published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from the Boston Medical Center at the Boston University School of Medicine conducted an undercover survey in which they called over 940 pharmacies in five U.S. cities, posing as either 17-year-old girls or as physicians assisting these girls.

While there have long been concerns about the risks of antibiotic overuse in humans, it remains far less clear whether there are similar risks of resistant bacteria when such antibiotics are given to livestock. But a recent U.S.

Bariatric surgery is gaining prevalence in the U.S., as more severely obese patients choose to go under the knife to improve their chances of losing excess weight.

In a virtually unprecedented decision, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, failed to vote on recommending the use of Pfizer s new vaccine, Prevnar 13, for adults aged 50 and over. This is the third consecutive meeting about Prevnar 13, a vaccine used to prevent streptococcal pneumonia, with this outcome. This story was little-noticed, yet the ensuing delay could lead to many thousands of deaths, says ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom in an op-ed that appears in today s New York Post.

Josh Bloom, The New York Post 3/26/12
The ugly toll of health efficiency

Black women in the U.S. are 40 percent more likely than white women to die of breast cancer, according to a study just published in Cancer Epidemiology.

[E]xclusive use of DTPs [dissolvable tobacco products] would greatly reduce risk for smoking caused disease compared with regular use of cigarettes. While we at ACSH make this point on a regular basis, this time, this statement actually comes from an FDA advisory panel.

Another study has added to the growing evidence that tranexamic acid, a simple generic drug, is the most effective means thus far of slowing bleeding in hemorrhaging trauma patients. Tranexamic acid in pill form (Lysteda) was first approved in the U.S. in 2009 for excessive menstrual bleeding, but it was not widely marketed; as a generic, it was not perceived to be profitable enough to warrant the extensive trials required for FDA approval of its use for trauma patients.