From a November 16, 2001 article by Theresa Kilen in North Carolina's Elkin Tribune, recounting an elementary school assembly to discuss bioterrorism fears:
[A] student asked if a person could get smallpox and anthrax at the same time.
"Yes," [Dr.] John Williams answered. "But I would have to compare the chances of that happening to a person having a bomb dropped on them and getting hit by a train at the same time."

Bioterrorism: How Great Are the Risks?
Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan
Remarks Delivered at Debate with Richard Preston, Author of The Demon in the Freezer.
Sponsored by the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation
Thursday, November l4, 2002, at the City University of New York

This weeks brings news that Osama bin Laden may be alive, audiotaping new denunciations of the West, and planning new terror attacks. It also brings word that weapons inspectors may be allowed back into Iraq. It seems like a fitting time, then, to ask what we know about biological weapons that might used by our enemies, starting with anthrax, and what we know about ability to defend against such attacks. It's also a good time to hear a few words from Dara Friedman, who worked for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tracking anthrax during the 2001 attacks.

There have been several reports lately about the odd, non-health-related projects that all that settlement money extracted from the tobacco companies went to, such as bridges, sprinkler systems, and even subsidies to tobacco farmers.

It's not every day that one of our projects here at the American Council on Science and Health moves people to write poetry. Well, actually, we've posted some ACSH-themed poetry, but rarely has anyone outside the organization written poetry about us, but now the Heartland Institute has.

If you've finally become numb to the constant health warnings from activists and the media, it's easy to forget just how steady the drumbeat of doom is and how often its rhythms are calculated to frighten us about things near and dear to us such as food, babies, and breasts.

The World Health Organization has released World Health Report 2002, one of its most ambitious projects ever (see: http://www.who.int/whr/2002/overview/en/), and it helps underscore the fact that big, obvious health threats do far more damage than the obscure or hypothetical risk of the week. As the WHO's introduction says:

On October 27 the New York Times published a story from the Associated Press newswire stating that the USDA had approved the used of irradiated meat in the national School Lunch Program. We here at ACSH applauded the move, since it would help protect some of the most vulnerable parts of the population from bacterial contamination of meats. We even posted a press release to that effect. But don't look for the press release today we had to take it down, because the AP story wasn't true.

While AIDS is the deadliest sexually-transmitted disease, we easily forget how much more widespread other STDs are. Today, there are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, roughly one out of every 345 people. It has rightly gained mass media attention and come to dominate sex education materials. Let's take a look at the numbers on some other scourges, though:
65 million, or 1 out of every 4 people: The number of people living with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) in the United States.

"Eating closer to nature" has become the latest imperative of the food faddist. To some, this means eating food raw (and not irradiated) whenever possible, which carries considerable risks. Raw can be dangerous, since the largest source of salmonella in the United States is uncooked sprouts, which cannot be rendered safe by any means (including being washed with chlorine). And irradiation probably wouldn't be popular with the raw foods crowd.