We tried to respectfully petition the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revisit their outmoded methods of assigning carcinogen risk to various chemicals in the environment, and their response, despite laws mandating their response within a set time period, was essentially: "Your message is very important to us -- please call back later."
How can a federal agency have no one minding the store, you say? That's what we want to know.

The world is keeping a vigilant watch on the "Asian bird flu" situation in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. "Bird flu" is a severe form of avian influenza, a viral disease that normally only infects birds and pigs.
The avian influenza virus has many forms of pathogenicity ranging from mild to severe strains, the latter of which can produce devastating respiratory problems and rapid, widespread mortality in poultry and other birds.

For the past fifty years -- dating back to the first national "carcinogen" scare, over cranberries during Thanksgiving 1959 -- Americans have been told that there are cancer causing agents in food, water, air, and various consumer products like paper towels, plastic toys, medical equipment -- even typewriter correction fluid.

Sir,
With reference to your report, "Infection milder but more widespread, study finds" (January 10), the new study from Vietnam and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which concludes that there are far more human cases of mild H5N1 avian influenza than World Health Organisation tallies suggest, does not warrant rethinking the current bird flu paradigm or viewing H5N1 as a lesser threat.
Aside from the preliminary nature of these findings, two important methodological limitations in the study should be noted.

A January 11, 2006 article by Carolyn Susman describes the disproportionate effect that celebrities have on the allocation of science funding and health decision-making, noting ACSH's commentary on the matter:

A new Archives of Internal Medicine report estimating the prevalence of milder forms of bird flu in Vietnam ("Is Exposure to Sick or Dead Poultry Associated with Flulike Illness?" by Thorson, Petzold, Thi Kim Chuc, and Ekdahl in the Jan. 9, 2006 issue) raises several important questions that have not been widely contemplated before.

Last summer, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer moved to "protect" Californians from the supposed threat of acrylamide found in foods. He has brought a suit to force producers of foods such as French fries to put warning labels on their products. May we respectfully suggest that the AG update himself on some scientific research?

This letter appeared on January 5, 2006 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
To the Editor:

Adherents of low-carbohydrate diet plans such as Atkins, South Beach, or the Zone should be somewhat chagrined at the results of one of the largest diet studies yet published. (1) The Women's Health Initiative (WHI) found no evidence that postmenopausal women who decrease the fat content of their diets (and thus increase carbohydrate) are prone to gain weight. Indeed, they showed a tendency to lose modest amounts of weight in a follow-up that spanned up to seven and one half years.

A January 04, 2006 post by Derek Lowe on the media blog Corante.com describes an online spat over ACSH's oft-repeated point (the inspiration for our lawsuit against the EPA) that high-dose rodent tests are poor predictors of human cancer risk: