Jury selection began last week in California in a case where employees will argue that IBM knowingly exposed them to chemicals used in the manufacturing of chips and disc drives that caused a variety of cancers, birth defects and other ailments. If found liable, IBM faces hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Ah, if only ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross could edit all the nation's health headlines! Below, he offers examples of the sorts of tweaks he might make, using some recent real headlines and article summaries from the Food and Drug Law Institute's SmartBrief newsletter as his raw material:
Lecithin May Help Lower Cholesterol [Then Again, It May Not]
"...Although no large-scale study has been conducted, some say it may be useful in the fight against Alzheimer's..."

October marks the two-year anniversary of the anthrax attacks that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Two years ago, some Americans realized for the first time the amount of animosity felt in some places toward the United States. What have we done since then to prevent such incidents and prepare for the future? President Bush embarked on his "war on terrorism," airlines have increased security, and now the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has released a report suggesting that the U.S.

In October of 2000, ABC News broadcast a television horror story depicting terrorists pitching bottles of anthrax spores onto the tracks of an American city's underground railway, releasing an invisible cloud of deadly bacteria that would kill 50,000 people within a week. The show served its purpose, horrifying viewers, so much so that ABC had to publicly clarify that the program was pure fiction. One year later, in October 2001, hypothetical bioterrorism became grim reality with one person at ABC's New York headquarters, the child of a producer, among the infected.

An October 15 New York Times piece by Marian Burros contained misleading information about the safety of irradiated foods. Ms. Burros must have been convinced about the toxic effects of irradiated foods, since she quoted and echoed the views of Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety, well known for their stances against food irradiation technology.
The facts, contrary to Burros' article, are:

Here at the American Council on Science and Health, we have repeatedly found ourselves engaged in correspondence like the following, so we thought we'd share...

Dear Dr. Whelan,

This year has seen whooping cough outbreaks in New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere. Whooping cough is a serious disease that, in the past, killed many children and caused considerable suffering for many others. A program of immunization had just about eliminated whooping cough in the United States, but this year the disease is making a comeback: the number of reported cases has greatly exceeded those reported in recent years, a scary reminder of another era.

An open letter to Center for Science in the Public Interest director Michael Jacobson:
The random mixing of science, politics, agendas, and self-aggrandizing when used against individuals who don't happen to endorse your opinions is a sad commentary on CSPI. Your media event criticizing the USDA-HHS Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is another example of the myopic vision and irrational knee-jerk judgmentalism expected from CSPI.

In 2001, the Surgeon General issued a call to action in response to what has come to be known as the "obesity epidemic." The call to action heightened public debate over obesity, which causes health problems that threaten to reverse many of gains made in recent decades against heart disease, several forms of cancer, and various chronic health problems. While much is being done to combat obesity as a whole, the most dramatic part of the epidemic has remained hidden.