Steve Forbes' "Fact and Comment" column for February 28, 2005 talks about the tragedy of the ban on DDT and mentions the views of ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan:
A quick search on Google or any Internet search machine for the topic "alcohol, pregnancy" will reveal that the precautionary principle is alive and well.
On February 13, 2005, ACSH received a letter from the mother of an autistic child asking what our response was to the February 8th release of a 1991 Merck & Co. memo. The memo in question, written eight years before the FDA noted this fact in 1999, cited knowledge of the possibility that additions to the pediatric vaccine schedule resulted in overexposure of children to the ethylmercury based vaccine preservative, thimerosal.
Next week, the American Legacy Foundation (Legacy), the national tobacco control organization formed as a result of the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) in 1998, will be giving Time, Inc. an award at its dinner for helping the American Legacy Foundation reach a national audience in support of the foundation s educational and awareness campaigns.(1) Corporations that advance tobacco control should be recognized and applauded for their work. However, as Time, Inc.
A February 23, 2005 article by Nancy Wang in the Stanford Daily described student attitudes toward smoking, noting some of the risks and citing ACSH:
I saw the posters everywhere this weekend "Celebrating Fifty Years of Flavor": Celebrating Marlboro Cigarettes!
Celebrating? Under what possible circumstance should we be celebrating the anniversary of the introduction of a product that is the leading cause of preventable death in America? It is bad enough that we tolerate it--and turn our heads away from the billions of dollars spent annually to advertise and promote it.
But we have to celebrate it, too?
Yesterday, the Smokefree Movies Action Network launched a campaign to obtain signatures on a global petition to encourage the Motion Picture Association of America to keep smoking out of youth-rated movies.
Your humble editor is taking next week off, but before I do so, I must quickly note a few milestones:
Despite nearly two million injury-causing car crashes each year, Congress and environmentalists apparently have made safety a lower priority than their (largely futile) efforts to reduce auto gas prices and carbon dioxide emissions. Despite years of government dictates, based largely on guesswork, the attempts of bureaucrats and politicians to raise auto fuel-economy standards have been a proven failure -- and a dangerous one for the public's safety.
An article by Colette Bouchez on WebMD.com February 16, 2005 describes fear of artificial sweeteners, with some calming and cautious words from ACSH's Dr. Ruth Kava, noting the list of artificial sweeteners tested and approved as safe:
