Earlier this week, Vice President and Presidential hopeful Al Gore declared a "war" on cancer. He promised to double federal spending on cancer research and make "a flood" of new cancer treatments and tests available to all Americans who need them. He promised that, "if I am entrusted with the presidency, I will work with you to put the same energy and priority into fighting cancer that we would put into preventing a war that could take 500,000 American lives every year." Raising not only the stakes but our expectations, the Vice President claimed that, "we can win this war."

This report represents a work in progress. ACSH realizes that research in the areas of health impacts of alcoholic beverages and of tobacco products is continuing, and we will update this paper as new research and insights are received. We welcome input from readers.

To the Editor:
It's about time some clamor was raised over the problem of noise in New York's subway tunnels ("Screeching Won't Come to Halt," news article, May 26).
Noise-induced hearing loss can be caused by a brief exposure to a loud sound, like an explosion, or by long-term exposure to sounds of lesser intensity. According to the National Institutes of Health, sounds below 75 decibels are not likely to impair hearing. As your article makes clear, subway noise can register up to 116 decibels, perhaps higher.

Continuing an almost five-century old British tradition of mixing Church and State, the Prince of Wales has again tried to reverse the tide of scientific inquiry and exploration a move many will equate with King Canute's futile attempt to hold back the ocean tides 1,000 or so years ago.

A recent issue of the journal "Science" focused on the dilemma posed by the so-called "precautionary principle," which has become enshrined in many international environmental treaties and regulations. The greatest source of controversy about the precautionary principle is its definition.
Our first introduction to the precautionary principle may have come from our mothers who told us it was better to be "safe rather than sorry", meaning we should buckle our seatbelts and throw out the left over food we forgot to refrigerate the night before.

Last week one of the most successful and innovative American corporations was pressured to take a safe and useful product off the market by a federal regulatory bureaucracy that demands precautionary action even in the absence of evidence that a health or environmental hazard exists.

Officials at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and its subdivision, the National Toxicology Program, announced this week that the artificial sweetener saccharin would no longer appear on their list of "cancer threats."

To the Editor:
As a public-health scientist, I applaud Andrew Revkin for his perspicacity in pointing out that malathion poses "no health threat to people" (news story, May 12). In its new report, the Environmental Protection Agency, generally no friend to pesticides, agrees with the overwhelming body of scientific evidence. While possibly a "health threat" to mice at very high doses, the trace levels to which New Yorkers would be exposed via spraying should cause no alarm.

To the Editor:
Holman Jenkins has certainly captured the irony involved in the states' de facto partnership with the tobacco industry, ostensibly to protect the continuing influx of settlement dollars into state coffers ("Look Who's Falling in Love...", April 26). However, he is wrong about a few points:

Predicting the future is always in fashion but particularly so as we enter a new millennium.