While years of news reports and Hollywood productions have led the public to believe that industrial pollution in the environment is causing local "cancer clusters," areas where cancer cases are thought to be more prevalent, there is no evidence of a link between so-called "clusters" and exposure to trace environmental chemicals.

Nearly a hundred and fifty products making antimicrobial/antibacterial claims had found their way into the consumer market since 1996 (the terms antimicrobial and antibacterial are often used interchangeably, technically antimicrobials fight a variety of organisms while antibacterials target bacteria). Today, there are over seven hundred such products on the market.

In the industrialized, modern world we've come to take a certain minimum level of public health so much for granted that it's easy to forget how much the history of the world has been shaped by disease.

Oh, no. As if smoking weren't dangerous enough, now comes tobacoo genetically-modified to entrap and sicken us more effectively.

A couple of weeks ago, we alerted our readers to a recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association underlining the potential problems of unsupervised use of herbal and other dietary supplements. We noted that at least some of these products could potentially interact with prescription and other pharmaceuticals with unforeseen adverse effects on consumers. In addition, the products themselves are not closely regulated in this country, and safe or effective dosages are not necessarily known.

Caveat Emptor. Consumers and journalists beware Anti-biotechnology activists engaged in a week of "direct action" at Starbucks Coffee shops this week aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again.

Science, like other disciplines, has the potential to be used for both good and bad. Approximately half a century ago, Nazi Germany's horrific abuses of scientific knowledge included experiments on unwilling human subjects. Today, Germany has done a drastic about-face. Lawmakers in Germany have just moved to ban the import of embryonic stem cells for research, seeing even the most microscopic flecks of human tissue as people or partial-people, potential victims that must be safeguarded. Experimentation on humans, the reasoning goes, was ghoulish in the 1940s and is equally ghoulish today.

The Oscar nominees were announced this month. One of the films up for Best Picture deserves some credit for acknowledging the complicated costs and benefits of going off one's medication: A Beautiful Mind. Another is perhaps the best depiction one could hope for of a mythic, pre-scientific past in which no one has to worry about such decisions and magical healing methods abound: Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Is there a difference between objective reporting and "balanced" reporting?

As noted by reader Meredith Kapushion, PETA, an animal rights organization opposed to hunting and the use of animals in medical experiments, is now suing New Jersey for having too many deer calling the burgeoning deer population a threat to "public safety," in large part because a deer wrecked PETA's Honda Civic. Here is an excerpt from the group's letter to the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, threatening to sue for over $6,000 in damages: