According to the Wall Street Journal, "White House aide David Axelrod said President Barack Obama was 'committed' to allowing the re-importation of pharmaceutical drugs into the U.S. and would push ahead with efforts to open the market," despite the fact that similar provisions were excluded from the healthcare reform bill in the Senate.

Health Canada is suggesting that the enzyme asparaginase be added to foods like french fries and potato chips in order to reduce the relatively high amounts of the animal carcinogen acrylamide that are created during cooking.
"We should to go back to the basics and point out that acrylamide is a naturally occurring chemical that is formed when you cook high-starch food," says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. "It's quite ubiquitous in our food supply. The case against it is that it causes cancer when given in high doses to lab animals. Well, what else is new?

Senator Diane Feinstein of California has called on Congress to ban bisphenol-A (BPA) from all food and beverage containers.
"Thanks to BPA, botulism from industrially canned food products has disappeared over the past thirty years," says Dr. Whelan. "This is a perfect example of a case of banning a substance with no regard for the benefits it provides."

Maine Representative Andrea Boland wants to require that cells phones in the state carry warnings about the unsubstantiated claim that the radiation they emit causes brain cancer.
"This despite the fact that there has never been any convincing evidence that cell phones have any link to cancer at any site, including brain cancer," says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan.

At least 152 people in New York have been diagnosed with mumps since a boy who unknowingly carried the illness over from England exposed a Jewish summer camp in Sullivan County.
"The majority of those affected were vaccinated against mumps," says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. "The protection rate with the mumps vaccine is somewhere in the 75% to 95% range."

An article in TIME reveals that "[o]ne in 110 American children are considered to fall somewhere along the autism spectrum, according to the latest report released by the federal government. ... The estimate also represents a stunning 57% increase in prevalence since 2002, when health officials first began a nationwide effort to quantify the risk of autism in childhood."
"The question is: is there really an increase or is this a matter of expanding the definition for purposes of enhanced and more accurate detection?" asks ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan.

The Wall Street Journal reports, "A working group made up of officials from several federal regulatory agencies Tuesday proposed restricting marketing of foods and beverages that contain significant amounts of sugar, sodium, and saturated fat, in response to concerns about childhood obesity."
"While these guidelines from this working group are voluntary at this point, it seems to me that the road leads to some official government restriction," says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross."

In response to yesterday's announcement by several companies that they will undertake a three-year phaseout of the flame-retardant decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE, also known simply as DECA), the EPA's assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, Steve Owens, issued the following statement:

The World Health Organization's special adviser to the WHO director general on pandemic influenza said yesterday that it is too early to determine if the H1N1 flu pandemic has passed.
"We don't know if seasonal flu will strike as it usually does this time of year or whether it will be crowded out by the ongoing, though waning, epidemic H1N1 influenza virus," says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. "Nor do we know if H1N1 will return in a third wave as previous H1N1 pandemics have done. The real bottom line is that everyone should get vaccinated against both H1N1 and the seasonal flu."

ACSH staffers would like to offer a seat at the table to Allysia Finley, assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, for her recent column chronicling some of the unintended, adverse effects of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) and its targeting of trace amounts of lead and phthalates in children's products.