The scale of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) current assault on industry is unprecedented. That’s the view of an editorial in yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal.
My mother smoked while she was pregnant with my sister and me. I used to light her cigarettes while she was driving. One time I handed her a lit Benson & Hedges backwards, burning her lip and nearly causing a huge freeway accident. Swerving wildly, she managed to avoid the car in front of her — and quickly grabbed for the cigarette, which had flown out of her hand. Puffing rapidly, she got the cherry back up to a glow, and a look of calm passed over her face as she blew out her first inhale.
A new treatment for the retinal disease age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) is making progress in clinical trials. Macular degeneration is a disease that can cause blindness, leading to the loss of central vision as a result of damage to nerve cells in the region of the retina known as the macula. It is the most common cause of blindness in adults, except perhaps for cataracts. The new treatment — called VEGF Trap-Eye — was developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Lab tests commissioned by the Associated Press found that drinking glasses depicting comic book characters such as Superman contain elevated levels of lead and cadmium. The tests were conducted following McDonald’s voluntary recall of 12 million Shrek glasses this past summer because cadmium was thought to be capable of leaching from the design at unsafe levels.
A new study suggests that Merck’s cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin reduces the risk of vascular events in patients with chronic kidney disease. The results from a clinical trial called Sharp, were presented at a conference for kidney specialists in Denver Saturday and indicate that treating kidney disease patients with Vytorin resulted in a 17 percent reduction in major vascular events compared with those receiving a placebo.
Kentucky-based Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals Inc. has agreed to remove the opiate-like narcotic painkiller Darvon from the market in light of new data suggesting the drug can cause serious or even fatal heart rhythm abnormalities. Darvon, whose generic name is propoxyphene, was first approved in 1957 and became a popular prescription pain reliever in the '70s, even though it offered relatively weak pain relief. ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross still harbors a cold spot in his heart for the drug.
Pope Benedict XVI made news around the world this weekend when he commented to a German Catholic journalist on the use of condoms by male prostitutes. “This can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants,” the pope said in the interview for the book Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times.
Kids in the Buckeye school district of Arizona may now have yet another reason to tease some of their classmates. Students who are considered obese by a body mass index test administered during gym class are receiving letters to take home to their parents notifying them of the results.
“If I were a parent and got that letter, I’d just be angry,” says Dr. Whelan.
Former U.S. Surgeon General and longtime ACSH friend Dr. C. Everett Koop (known as “Chick”) is warning that the public’s “irrational fear” of AIDS has given way to a “a growing sense of complacency” that’s just as dangerous. The 95-year-old retired pediatric surgeon spoke at the National Press Club on Wednesday from a wheelchair while in Washington to attend a national summit on HIV.
The excessive and improper use of antibiotics has contributed to the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria, yet doctors are still prescribing antibiotics for ear infections when pressured by parents — which is not only unnecessary but expensive.
