Smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes are being recognized as safer, satisfying cigarette substitutes by increasing numbers of American smokers, writes ACSH advisor and professor of medicine at the University of Louisville Brad Rodu.

Every now and then, a new study turns up warning consumers that diet soda is too good to be true.

In case you re still wondering whether you really need to have someone rub sunscreen on your back at the beach, new evidence for the benefits of sun block have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Should the cancer drug Avastin be approved as a treatment for metastatic breast cancer? The FDA has been considering this question since the emotionally charged debate began last December, when the agency first proposed revoking the drug s indication for that use. As expected, on Wednesday, an FDA advisory panel voted unanimously to recommend the revocation, citing follow-up studies by the manufacturer, Roche, that showed that the drug did not significantly increase survival time.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that screening for lung cancer with low-dose spiral computed tomography (CT) does reduce mortality; however, the screening method s high rate of false positives means that it should be used judiciously.

The precautionary principle has given birth to fears that infants delivered via Cesarean section or with the aid of forceps are at risk of phthalate and bisphenol A (BPA) contamination. At least those are the findings of a something like a study published Tuesday in France s Health Watch Institute publication, Weekly Epidemiological Bulletin (Bulletin Epidemiologic Hebdomadaire).

The Safe Cosmetics Act, now in a 2011 edition, is back in Congress and its claims about cosmetics ingredient safety are about as superficial as the pro

On the breast cancer front, new studies are promoting the use of two well known preventive measures. First, a large new Swedish study challenges recent assertions that the survival benefits from routine mammogram screenings are often outweighed by false positive results or other needless followup procedures.

In the past 15 months, the FDA has approved three new drugs for the treatment of late-stage prostate cancer. Two of them Dendreon s Provenge and Johnson & Johnson s Zytiga were shown in recent clinical trials to add between two and five months to median survival (about a year and a half after using docetaxel, the current standard of care approved in 2004) for men with late-stage cancer.

After publishing a consistent stream of fear-mongering, anti-chemical stories for USA Today, we d like to finally applaud journalist Liz Szabo for her article yesterday on the importance of childhood vaccinations. We re happy to see that Ms. Szabo has resorted to using sound science as she discusses the potentially lethal consequences when parents opt not to get their children vaccinated.