ACSH staffers are happy to pass along a message from the Center for Consumer Freedom, which reminds you to enjoy your holiday season without falling victim to the scare tactics of food activists: "[N]aysayers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and vegan radicals at the [Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine]-affiliated 'Cancer Project' are trying to make this a season of guilt and fear. (Our advice is to ignore them: Put what you want on your holiday menu. Enjoy your pot roast, cheese, stuffing, and pie.)"

The non-profit, non-partisan Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) has awarded their "Worst 'Science' Journalist of the Year" distinction to the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof for his article about the "danger" of BPA and other plastics chemicals.
"His article about 'cancer in the kitchen' was very one-sided and unscientific," says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. "STATS just verifies what we said last week about that article, which is that it only presented the activist point of view and didn't consider any of the science. This is a well-deserved award."

Researchers are interested in how Japan was able to reduce H1N1 flu mortality after a WHO report claimed that their rate of death from the disease was 1/16 that of the U.S. and 1/43 that of Australia. Some suggested explanations include Japan's high rates of adherence to hand-washing and mask-wearing practices and early use of Tamiflu to reduce the severity of flu symptoms.

Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York plan to introduce the "BPA-Free Kids Act," which would ban the chemical from containers for young children's products. Activist pressure to restrict the use of BPA is heating up as the FDA prepares to release their latest opinion on it. The Breast Cancer Fund, for example, has called for the FDA to issue an immediate ban on BPA in hard plastic food containers and require labeling of all other food packaging containing BPA.

ACSH's Dr.

This piece first appeared on December 11, 2009 on TCSDaily.com.
The pharmaceutical industry gets blamed for many flaws in America's healthcare system. Witness an editorial in last week's The Lancet, a widely read British medical journal calling for new antibiotics to be created.

The CDC released its Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, a list of chemicals found in blood and urine samples collected from participants in CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

The Wall Street Journal reports, "A popular class of bone-building drugs known as bisphosphonates appears to significantly reduce women's risk of breast cancer, according to research presented Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium."

ACSH staffers were (almost) speechless when we found out that the New Jersey State Senate voted unanimously to restrict the use of e-cigarettes as though they were equivalent to standard, life-threatening cigarettes.
"This is a big step in the wrong direction," says ACSH's Jeff Stier, "because while there are no controlled studies yet, we know that many smokers are successfully using e-cigarettes to quit smoking cigarettes. And to treat e-cigarettes as if they are as dangerous as cigarettes is a huge leap based on no data whatsoever."

"Last night I attended an event at NYU about how the media report on health controversies, such as the real effectiveness of flu vaccines," says ACSH's Jeff Stier. "The two speakers were Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism on which I have a review coming out soon in the Weekly Standard and Shannon Brownlee, who wrote a controversial piece for The Atlantic about our need for more data on the efficacy of the seasonal flu vaccine and how effective it is in protecting people in different age groups.