Yesterday, I received a cloning update newsletter that contained the title "Hollywood clunker spreads fear and misconception." At first, I was confused as to how a film as God-awful as the new sci-fi film Godsend could spread anything other than contempt among those who paid to sit through it. But after exploring the movie's elaborate marketing, the confusion was easier to understand. A website for the Godsend Institute, which looks as real as Ebay, offers that fictional organization's cloning services.

Recently, I attended a meeting in Trinidad dealing with counterfeiting not of currency, which is what most of us associate with the word "counterfeit." This conference dealt with counterfeit drugs fake pharmaceuticals and I was one of the speakers. I was supposed to speak about "consumer aspects" of drug counterfeiting, but in truth I spoke mainly about the wild and wooly world of the Internet, and its relationship with drugs real, counterfeit, and in-between.

The movie "Supersize Me" is misleading and a perversion of healthful nutritional practices, according to physicians and scientists at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). The documentary follows star and director Morgan Spurlock as he overeats at McDonald's restaurants every day for one month.

Research shows that while European consumers are getting drug prices up to a third below U.S. levels, their nations are paying a cost by losing research and development jobs to countries where better profits are being made. Price controls and slow approval processes are viewed by drug companies as hurting Europe's ability to compete with the U.S., and in the long term, the study shows, Europe will pay an economic price for lower drug prices.
Financial Times (London), April 28

The San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund has concluded that American cosmetics including nail polish put women at risk of cancer and children at risk of suffering birth defects. Never mind that no mainstream cancer epidemiologist believes that cosmetics contribute in anyway to human cancer or reproductive effects. The Fund is convinced that "chemicals" in the environment are the culprits and thus must be targeted and banished.

America's technological prowess and enviable high standard of living are now under unprecedented assault by an array of self-appointed "consumer advocates" who claim our food, water, air, and consumer products are making us sick.

Earlier this month Mississippi State Department of Health officials identified a bird in Marion County with West Nile virus the first official identification of the virus this year. Health officials in Ohio have identified one probable human case of West Nile virus and are awaiting confirmatory test results.
Last year the number of cases of West Nile virus (WNV) in the United States doubled, marking the worst, albeit not the most deadly, outbreak ever recorded with 8,649 cases and 206 deaths, up from 4,156 cases and 300 deaths the year before.

The public, who too frequently look to the five o'clock news, local papers, and magazines as sources of health information, is left wondering if it is safe to drink tap water, to heat food in plastic containers, or even to eat fried foods for fear of encountering a myriad of so-called carcinogens. How can the average American separate the wheat from the chaff to determine which of the unnerving tales hyperbolized by the press, if any, are valid, and which would better be fodder for the next sci-fi flick?

Economists told a Department of Health and Human Services panel on April 27 that allowing reimportation from Canada of pharmaceuticals so that they can be purchased by Americans at the low prices mandated by Canadian would hurt the research and development of new drugs in the lung run.

Earlier this week, the New York Times editorial page opined about the effectiveness of banning smoking in public places as a means of cutting down heart disease risk. Citing a very small, six-month study of heart attack admissions to a hospital in Helena, Montana, the Times editors concluded that "a six-month ban on smoking in public places...appears to have sharply reduced the number of heart attacks."