Physicians should exercise extra caution when prescribing antidepressants for older patients since they could negatively react with or cause adverse side effects when combined with other drugs, finds a new study by Thomson Reuters, the University of Southern California, Sanofi Aventis and others, published in the American Journal for Geriatric Psychiatry.

ACSH staffers were troubled — again — by a Los Angeles Times article covering a new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives that claims children born to mothers who live “near freeways” have twice the risk of autism. The association only held between autism and freeways — not major roads.

Thanks in large part to FDA over-regulation, there is a paucity of new antibiotics. Yet antibiotic-resistant bacteria run rampant worldwide, ACSH’s Drs. Josh Bloom and Gilbert Ross write in an op-ed published in National Review Online. The number of new antibiotics being approved is negligible, and currently only four companies manufacture 80 percent of the world’s vaccines. Dr. Bloom and Dr. Ross point out that the FDA is mostly to blame for this predicament:

The FDA yesterday announced that it would be withdrawing approval for treatment of advanced stage breast cancer with the drug bevacizumab, which is known by the trade name Avastin. The FDA took this action as the drug has not been shown on average to improve outcomes for patients with advanced breast cancer.

While the World Health Organization (WHO) reported yesterday that confirmed malaria cases in 11 African nations dropped by more than fifty percent over the last decade, these results were mitigated by a number of less welcome findings.

The U.S. Senate yesterday followed the lead of the House of Representatives and passed legislation setting up a National Alzheimer’s Project within the Department of Health. The President is expected to sign the bill, which calls for a “War on Alzheimer’s.”
The plan aims to coordinate and augment efforts to develop drugs to delay or treat the disease and to discover means towards earlier diagnosis.

Remarkably little media attention has been given to some excellent news announced on Wednesday: U.S. deaths from heart disease dropped by 28 percent and those from stroke declined by 45 percent between 1997 and 2007, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).
This improvement reflects dramatic continued improvements in both the treatment and diagnosis of these ailments, says ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB), part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, approved regulations in July 2007 and December 2008 on diesel vehicles that will limit emissions for trucks, buses, bulldozers, backhoes and other construction equipment. But according to a June op-ed in Forbes.com by Dr. Henry Miller, a Hoover Institution fellow, and ACSH Trustee Dr.

After publishing a Dispatch item on the pending Food Safety and Modernization Act, in which we stated that approximately 5,000 people in the U.S. are killed annually from food-borne illness, our reader Dean O. Cliver, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and an ACSH advisor, wrote in to tell us that the real number of deaths was actually only 18.

Getting people aged 50 and older to adhere to colorectal cancer screening guidelines can be just as arduous a task as getting sugar-crazed kids to eat their Brussels sprouts, but a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that mailing patients a letter from a physician in addition to an informational brochure and DVD can increase screening rates at three months and keep the difference sustained for up to six months.