Health officials from the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization announced at a meeting last week that rubella, or German measles, has officially been eradicated from the Americas.

In this Kids Edition of Dispatch, we discuss childhood obesity, vaccines, and high blood pressure among teens!

TV viewing, even briefly, found to be associated with weight gain in children. Can TV cause obesity? No. Can sedentary behavior for which TV may well be a surrogate promote obesity? Yes it can, but how much is too much? Let s not mix up cause and effect.

Bullying is a common topic in the news these days. While in the past it consisted mainly of physical abuse, the problem has been magnified many times over by the explosion of social media.

We recently wrote about a bill, (SB 277) which is up for approval in the California legislature. The law, if passed would require that children be vaccinated in order to attend school.

US health officials have long warned that too much salt intake as a child can raise lifelong risk of high blood pressure. However, a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics suggests it s actually potassium intake that kids should be aware of.

'Out of the frying pan and into the fire' and 'the cure may be worse than the disease' are two colloquialisms for how EPA's worrisome ban-first-study-later policies may be doing more harm than good.
Specifically, the rush away from BPA is not justified by science, though of course companies can drop anything they want in a free market. Even the European Food Safety Authority agrees BPA is harmless, and they once declared that water does not cure thirst and that ugly fruit should not be sold so convincing them to be against the science consensus is quite easy.

But now, an immune-based approach that is completely different from the statin mode of action, may be an alternative way to prevent cardiovascular events. Not by inhibiting the production of cholesterol, but by preventing the release of LDL cholesterol the real culprit. This could end up being superior to the mode of action by which statins function.

Americans have an obsession with sports. We flock by the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, to see our favorite team play on their home turf. We cram into living rooms and bars to watch the games when we can t be there in person. We discuss them obsessively with our fellow fans and listen to the talking heads dissect them ad nauseum

Americans trying to lose weight by eating a balanced, low calorie diet often refer to the calorie counts on food packages. But as an article in the New York Times explains, some of these counts could be as much as 25 percent too high.