Authoritarian governments killed some 100 million people during the twentieth century. Simon Chapman, in an essay on Tobacco.org, notes a similarly lethal but less hotly debated menace:
"Between 1950 and 2000, smoking caused about 62 million deaths in developed countries...but they fail to create a sense of urgency in the media, policy-makers, or the public. As Joseph Stalin argued: 'A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.'"

It's time to get things straight in the crooked world of illegal drugs. As a parent of a son who occasionally experiments with illegal substances such as marijuana and "ecstasy," I fear most two events: (1) a phone call from a hospital emergency room saying that he is dead or dying, and (2) his becoming addicted to a drug that ruins his career, relationships, and health.

Some reports in the media have suggested that sexual activity increases the risk of prostate cancer. "The evidence, however, is still far from conclusive," says Carmen Rodriguez, MD, MPH, senior epidemiologist and director of the Lifelink Blood Collection Study for the ACS. Dr. Rodriguez believes that there is no consistency in the research. "It is an interesting and possible real association," Rodriguez notes, "but not an established risk factor."

"If my son eats anything with sugar in it, he starts bouncing off the walls. He had a piece of cake at his cousin's birthday party last Saturday, and I couldn't get him to settle down for the rest of the day. The next time he goes to a party no cake!"

Cigarette manufacturers have always argued that they produce just another ordinary, legal, consumer product. One manufacturer, Philip Morris, has a long-running advertisement which displays cigarettes in a shopping cart chock full of its other in-house merchandise: Jello, Miracle Whip, Kraft Ranch salad dressing, Velveeta and Marlboros. Such a display is about as homogeneous as the scene in E.T. in which the alien attempts to blend into a cluster of teddy bears and other stuffed animals.

Consumers are often seduced by the widespread use of the descriptors "safe" and "natural" by producers and marketers at times with quite deleterious health effects. Thus, in 1995, a woman required a liver transplant after overconsumption of tea made from the chaparral plant. And heart transplant patients learned the hard way that supplements of St. John's Wort could interfere with the immune suppressant they must take to prevent rejection of their transplanted organs.

As parents around the country were getting their children ready to go to school this morning, ABC's Good Morning America (GMA) and CNN were both giving parents warnings about how their children get to and from school one about diesel fumes on school buses, the other about ill-fitting seatbelts. GMA went with the diesel fuel story, and that raises questions about how they prioritize health stories.

Steve Milloy in his weekly Foxnews.com column, commenting on conflicting NCI mammography advice:
"What's a woman even her physician to make of this? Is this the National Cancer Institute or the National Confusion Institute?"

You have a healthy, balanced diet, are blessed with good metabolism, and are not at all overweight. And you certainly don't smoke. So who cares that you're a couch potato? Like most Americans, you don't think you're at risk for heart disease.
But new research published in the January issue of the American Journal of Hypertension suggests that being thin alone is not enough to protect your heart. You need to be active too. The benefits of being physically active go well beyond burning calories.

Tattooing and body piercing are somewhat trendy now, having gained popularity in the 1990s. However, these forms of "body modification/body art" are anything but new. Both have been around since ancient times and are practiced in many cultures. Although their popularity attests that millions of customers feel both procedures are worth doing, there are some potential risks and complications.
Tattooing