Finally a bit of sound science and common sense seems to be percolating from an official governmental agency unfortunately, not in our country. The U.K.'s Cabinet level behavioral insight team, better known as the nudge unit, is encouraging the use of smokeless nicotine cigarettes to help addicted smokers quit, thus hoping to prevent tens of thousands of smoking-related deaths among Britons.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has been getting a lot of press lately, largely due to infighting among Republican presidential candidates. Both former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann have repeatedly attacked Texas Gov. Rick Perry s efforts to require that schoolgirls in his state receive the HPV vaccine.

It would come as no surprise to us to learn that the number of flu outbreaks has decreased in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities whose workers have higher rates of vaccination.

Dr. Oz is at it again. On Tuesday, his Dr. Oz Show warned parents that the apple juice they re giving their children may be harmful. Apparently, the celebrity doctor s television show staff arranged to have several samples of store-bought apple juice tested for arsenic, and found that the arsenic levels in some brands were higher than others. The doctor went on from there to warn parents about alleged dangers from these minuscule amounts of arsenic.

In a survey of 1,000 adults in California, 43 percent expressed some reservations about talking to their primary care physician about depression symptoms. Those were the results of a recent study led by Dr. Robert Bell at the University of California, Davis, and published in the Annals of Family Medicine.

When it comes to pills, newer is not always better, though according to a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the majority of Americans still think so.

Harking back to her youth in the 1940s and 50s, New York Times columnist Jane Brody recalls a simpler time when vending machines weren t around, the presence of fast food restaurants was barely perceptible, and ads for prepared foods and sodas were few and far between.
Yeah, right, says ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross. Ms. Brody must have a highly rose-tinted memory; her recollections read like something out of a fairy tale.

Fed up with the public s misperception that consuming high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is unhealthy, the corn industry launched a new ad campaign last year with a catchy tag line informing people that, when it comes to HFCS or regular sugar, Your body can t tell the difference. Sugar is sugar. In addition, the Corn Refiners Association, which produced the advertisements, began lobbying the FDA to grant it permission to rebrand HFCS as simply corn sugar a move that will now be left up to the courts to decide after a group of sugar farmers filed a lawsuit contesting the name change.

About fifty years ago, Dr. Tu Youyou began her research in China, which led to the discovery of an improved treatment for malaria. This discovery assumed major proportions due to the development of a high level of resistance to chloroquine, the standard of care at that time. After analyzing 380 extracts from 200 herbs, Dr. Tu discovered that the sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua, held the answer to eliminating the malaria-causing microbe in animals.

The results of an international study comprised of data from 10 case-control studies of cervical cancer and 16 human papillomavirus (HPV) prevalence surveys show that women who used an intrauterine device (IUD) had a 50 percent lower risk of cervical cancer, as compared to women who never used one. IUDs are devices that a gynecologist places through the cervix into the uterus in order to prevent pregnancy.