One need not look any further than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to realize that science often kowtows to politics in today s policy debates. In an op-ed featured in yesterday s Daily Caller, ACSH s Dr.

Dr. Gilbert Ross in The Daily Caller, July 13, 2011
Politics Has Overtaken Science at the EPA

Generic drugs should be manufactured to look exactly like their name brand counterparts, write Dr. Jeremy Greene and Dr. Aaron Kesselheim in an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine. But under a current federal regulation known as trade dress, generics cannot be produced to resemble branded medications already on the market.

How do you combat obesity in low-income neighborhoods? Increase access to grocery stores that sell fresh fruits and vegetables, many public health experts have long advised. It turns out, however, that this policy may actually have less credibility than previously believed.

In a co-authored commentary for the Archives of Internal Medicine, New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley and Dr. Lynn Silver, director of the Office of Science and Policy, call on the FDA to provide consumers with a public, product-specific national nutritional database containing information similar to what can now be found on individual products in the grocery or supermarket. Because obesity and other food-related ailments, including diabetes, are on the rise, Dr.

Called the July Effect, this phenomenon refers to the medical trainee changeovers that occur in teaching hospitals during the month of July and which have long been associated with an increase in mortality rates and medical errors. However, depending on which publication you read either The New York Times or the Annals of Internal Medicine you ll receive conflicting information about the validity of this trend.

As Congress sets to work on a five-year FDA reauthorization bill, Republicans are proposing to ease recent conflict-of-interest rules they believe are depriving the agency of needed pharmaceutical expertise. The rules determine who can take part in FDA advisory panels, which counsel the FDA on the benefits and risks of new drugs under consideration.

Women who have just given birth and are older than 34 or have had a Cesarean section are now advised to avoid contraceptives containing estrogen, say new government guidelines. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have concluded that birth control pills containing estrogen could increase the risk of a blood clot in some new mothers when taken within six weeks of giving birth.

Anyone who s had chicken pox (varicella zoster, a member of the herpes family of viruses) has a one-in-three chance of developing shingles many years later, and the risk only increases with age. Yet although the FDA approved a vaccine (Zostavax) for the virus in 2006 and, this March, approved its use for those age 50 and over, very few at-risk adults have been vaccinated. Adults over 60 are most vulnerable to shingles, but in 2009, only 10 percent of this population was vaccinated.

Who exactly should be screened for cardiovascular disease? New research indicates that a computerized tomography (CT) scan of the coronary arteries can uncover risks of heart disease even in patients without clinical symptoms or even risk factors.