ACSH has long advocated the heath benefits associated with moderate alcohol consumption. Now a new review of data from the Nurses Health Study, published in the journal Stroke, finds that one drink a day may lower a woman s risk of stroke.

We constantly hear that we are on the brink of developing personalized cancer treatments, but how much of that is really true? A sobering study published in the New England Journal of Medicine takes a grim look at the issue and concludes that tailoring therapies to effectively target cancer is more difficult and nuanced than originally hoped.

ACSH would like to give a special thanks to Gerald Baron, author of CrisisBlogger, for his latest blog entry alerting readers to our publication Scared to Death. As Baron points out, [ACSH s] focus seems to be combating junk science and situations where politics and public opinion intervenes [sic] in good policy making relating to science and health.

I had to read something twice yesterday to convince myself that someone didn't spike my Cap'n Crunch with LSD. Turns out they didn't. Which is for the most part good, except that I'm still having trouble explaining what I saw.

Over half a million middle school students and three million high school students smoke, announced U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin while presenting the office s first report on youth smoking since 1994. Nine in 10 smokers pick up the habit before their 18th birthday, thus prompting Dr. Benjamin to declare youth smoking an epidemic that requires a renewed effort to prevent teens from smoking.

We ve previously reported on studies indicating that circumcision results in reduced rates of HIV transmission in Africa, but now a new study finds that the procedure may also lower the risk of contracting genital herpes (HSV-2) as well. Presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the latest study collected data on men in Orange Farm, South Africa, both before and after a pro-circumcision public health initiative gained popularity in the city.

Less than one day after a report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) provoked a media furor over the food police scare that a certain ingredient used in soda caramel coloring was a carcinogen, Coca-Cola and Pepsi announced that they have been in the process of reformulating their products to reduce the chemical in question: 4-MEI.

Yesterday we reported on the alarming rise in the incidence of C. difficile (Clostridium difficile) bacterial infections and deaths due to increases in both its prevalence and its antibiotic resistance. The development and discovery of new antibiotic drugs would help counter the problem, but pharmaceutical companies are largely unmotivated to enter this research arena, mainly because investing in such drugs is not profitable.

A recent op-ed in The New York Times by Sam Waksal, the founder of the biotech firm ImClone who is probably best remembered for his involvement in a large insider trading scandal in 2002, caught ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom s attention, largely for its absurdity. In the piece, Waksal argues that individuals and insurers should only pay for drugs that actually work, which he outlines in his "pay-for-response" pricing model.

If you read the recent report by the Silent Spring Institute, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, you may come away with the impression that you should be afraid very afraid of any product containing any chemical, especially if it has more than two syllables and is difficult to pronounce.