In January, Robert's American Gourmet, maker of a popular functional snack food line, recalled Pirate's Booty for mislabeling. The Good Housekeeping Institute independently tested the product and found that it contained 147 calories and 8.5 grams of fat per serving quite a difference from the 120 calories and 2.5 grams of fat reported on the label. The company attributed the discrepancy to a manufacturing problem. They needed to purchase new equipment to meet the public's high demand for Pirate's Booty.

After months of wrangling with Senate Democrats over a nominee for head of the FDA, the Bush administration has appointed an academic, a former federal regulator, to the number two job. Veterinarian Lester Crawford will run the agency as deputy commissioner until a permanent head is nominated and confirmed.

"Obviously, we're disappointed."
Len Selfon, director of benefits programs for Vietnam Veterans of America, upon hearing that in a new study, Agent Orange was not found to have caused cancer in children (from the Associated Press, February 28, 2002).

If the Senate follows the House's lead and bans all human cloning, it launches a war that will have a real human body count especially among diabetics and Parkinson's sufferers and will produce considerable political fallout, especially for Republicans. In the end, it may be a war fought over the Islets of Langerhans. Those are the clumps of pancreatic cells that make insulin, and they're a frequently-cited example of the sort of cell that cloning could be used to produce.

Based on a position paper written by John C. LaRosa, M. D.
President, State University of New York Health Science Center
Brooklyn, New York, USA

You have to admit: Law firms defending the behavior of cigarette companies, especially from 1950-1980, really have their work cut out for them. Their mission is to defend a client who for decades systematically misrepresented the truth about cigarette smoking and health.

The following letter from ACSH's medical director appeared in today's Wall Street Journal
To the Editor:

Why do news reports sometimes suggest that men can lower their risk of prostate cancer with changes in behavior, such as diet modification or changing the frequency of sexual activity?

The American Medical Association took out a full-page ad in the February 27 New York Times, chastising NBC for deciding to run hard liquor ads, putting impressionable teens at risk. The AMA has thereby compounded a mistake begun by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

My favorite way of putting risks into perspective is to consider the average loss of life expectancy they cause, LLE (indicated in parentheses throughout this article). I present here a brief catalog of these, taken from my paper published in the September 1991 issue of Health Physics Journal.