Doctors may soon find themselves checking Google more frequently not out of idleness, but as a tool to keep current on flu epidemics. Google Flu Trends is a service that predicts upcoming patterns of flu prevalence by tracking how often people conduct Internet searches for flu-related items.

While weight-loss surgery has been championed as an effective treatment for many severely obese adults who were otherwise unsuccessful at losing their excess weight, there is still an ongoing debate over the minimum age required to receive such a procedure.

Although he initially viewed the study as nothing more than nonsense, ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom was dismayed to discover wide media pickup of a reckless report claiming that, somehow, 14,000 Americans had died as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident last March in Japan. So, in an op-ed posted yesterday on Forbes.com, he debunks the study authors bizarre claims.

If we frequently promote useful smoking cessation aids such as smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes, it s because there are promising signs that these methods deliver a much higher quit rate than the methods that are conventionally promoted which have frustratingly low rates of success.

New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley launched a new campaign this week to counter obesity in the city: smaller portions. Cut your portions. Cut your risk, one poster states, depicting an overweight diabetic man whose leg has been amputated. The campaign takes note of the correlation between increased serving sizes of food and increased obesity rates over the past several decades.

A regular, low dose of aspirin has long been thought to be an effective preventive measure against heart attack and stroke, but a large new analysis of data from several clinical trials suggests that reductions in mortality extend only to people with a history of cardiovascular disease.

In his latest blog post for Medical Progress Today, ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom uses his unique brand of sardonic humor to lambaste California s Proposition 65.

Last year, 255 million prescriptions in the U.S. were written for cholesterol-lowering statins, which have been safely used for decades. Yet a new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine is raising a red flag that this class of drugs may increase the risk of diabetes in older women by 50 percent.

In ACSH s recent publication, The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2011, hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) made the list. Alhough our report debunked the various unfounded accusations that this method of natural gas extraction has received, it seems as though The New York Times failed to get the message.

Beyond being banned from smoking in public places or inside the workplace, more and more smokers are finding that their habit may bar them from being hired in the first place. There is an increasing trend among employers to refuse to hire smokers or anyone who tests positive for nicotine, which may include even those who use smokeless tobacco or nicotine patches while in the process of quitting.