The journal Technology (Vol. 9, No.s 5-6) featured a review by Sorin R. Straja ACSH's book America's War on "Carcinogens", saying, in part:
The FDA announced on Tuesday that the possible presence of benzene in soft drinks is not a cause for concern. In a response to a request for information by the Environmental Working Group, the FDA stated that benzene levels in the majority of beverages sampled thus far are either well below the legal limit or below the level of detection.
I listen to NPR, I read The Nation, and I own every album Bob Dylan ever made. But I'm sick and tired of all the bad press that pharmaceutical companies have been getting lately. Fernando Meirelles's film The Constant Gardener is only one example -- in it, drug executives conspire to kill their critics, and the companies' desire for profit is derided with the line "No drug company does something for nothing." But in the real world, pharmaceutical companies are not so villainous. Here's why.
A March 23, 2006 article in the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, FL, by Kristen Gerencher notes the excess praise for organic food from Consumer Reports and the Environmental Working Group, quoting ACSH Founders Circle member Christine Bruhn, Ph.D., and ACSH Advisor Fergus Clydesdale, Ph.D., as critics of organic claims:
A March 23, 2006 article by Jill Gardiner described reactions to a federal report saying New York has the nation's dirtiest air, including a reaction from ACSH's Jeff Stier:
A spokesman for the American Council on Science and Health, Jeff Stier, said that while exposure to high levels of toxic chemicals over a long period of time was something to worry about, it is not credible to suggest that the level of those toxins in the air is cancer-causing.
A new report from Norway, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, presents stark new data on the lethal effects of cigarettes. The Norwegian scientists accumulated smoking and mortality data from almost 50,000 people over the course of twenty-five years -- the largest study ever to include women, who comprised half of the study subjects. The subjects were in the forty- to seventy-year age range.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is right about one thing: the public should hold it accountable for how its programs work. The EPA said as much last month in a press release announcing its participation in ExpectMore.gov, which "provides the public with candid, easy to understand assessments of federal programs," including approximately forty-three from EPA.
So why did this huge, wasteful federal agency stonewall a small, information-seeking consumer advocacy organization and flout the law in the process?
The potential for an avian flu pandemic is something we're constantly asked about at the American Council on Science and Health. It doesn't help that headlines constantly blare about "deadly" outbreaks in Asia and Europe without troubling to clarify whether the outbreaks are deadly to humans or birds. Still, unlike so many health scare stories we analyze, bird flu is not just hype but a real potential threat -- the tricky part is determining how big that potential is.
Skepticism is hard. As a recent best-selling book noted, doubletalk is a pervasive part of an attention-driven, media-dominated economy. But we can't just choose to doubt everything all the time, or we'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning for fear of the floorboards inexplicably collapsing. So we each come up with our little rubrics for deciding what to discount.
Last night almost the entire ACSH staff trekked down to Times Square to see a preview of Thank You for Smoking, based on the Christopher Buckley novel (a very humorous one indeed) about Nick Naylor, the smokesman -- er, spokesman -- for the tobacco industry's pseudo-scientific research arm.
We all enjoyed it and laughed at the debates among the lobbyist characters over which of their industries killed more people -- cigarettes, alcohol, or guns. Clearly, as the tobacco rep argued, his industry won hands down. No debate there!
