Two of the largest manufacturers of mentholated cigarettes initiated a lawsuit against the FDA Friday to prevent the consideration of an upcoming FDA panel report recommending expanding the current flavored cigarette ban to include menthol varieties. Lorillard and R.J.

Even as The Lancet — purveyor not so long ago of fraudulent claims that autism and vaccines were linked — was promoting more junk science, some important real science was turning up on this side of the Atlantic in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. A study of 5,519 men conducted by Dr.

Yesterday also brought word that the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the non-profit group charged with co-ordinating organ allocation, was considering a new policy which would give explicit preference to younger patients in need of kidney transplants. This would reverse existing policy which gives preference to those within a region of the country who have been waiting longest for a donation.

While Swedish health authorities were putting forward nonsense about snus, the highly reputed British medical journal The Lancet was releasing a “study” purporting to show that exposure to traffic was the leading proximate cause of heart attacks. The researchers also claimed that air pollution triggered more heart attacks than getting angry, having sex, snorting cocaine, smoking marijuana or suffering a respiratory infection.

Yesterday brought word from two continents of extraordinary government action — and absurd lies — regarding tobacco.In the U.S., Judge Gladys Kessler announced a decision requiring tobacco companies to run advertisements and put notices on their product packages acknowledging that they deliberately misled the public about the health effects of so-called light cigarettes and the addictiveness of nicotine.

After months-long pressure on the city to replace light fixtures containing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in schools, the Environmental Protection Agency finally got its way yesterday when the Bloomberg administration said it would allocate $708 million for the effort over the next decade. Fluorescent light fixtures in 772 New York City Schools — almost two-thirds of the city’s school buildings — will either be replaced completely or get new ballasts because they contain PCBs.

Shingles, a disease caused by the Varicella zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chicken pox, will affect an estimated one in three Americans at some point, and there are one million new cases in the U.S. each year. What’s worse, a new study from the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings says that people can get shingles more than once.

Pertussis, better known as whooping cough, came back with a vengeance in 2010, infecting over 21,000 people — the highest incidence since 2005 and among the worst years of infection in over half a century.

Two new large meta-analysis studies published yesterday in BMJ provide further evidence for a view which ACSH has promoted for years: moderate alcohol consumption protects against cardiovascular disease.

Up to half of sexually active young people will get a sexually transmitted disease (STD) by age 25. Yet many avoid the embarrassment of getting an STD test or recoil from the prospect of discussing these subjects with their parents. For this population, Johns Hopkins University has developed a program that provides a free mail-in STD testing kit which offers anonymity and convenience.