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Is Biogen's Alzheimer's drug a historic achievement or red herring? There are plenty of opinions on both sides. Nonetheless, it received FDA approval despite an unanimous downvote from its own expert panel. What is going on here? No one knows, but to me, it just doesn't smell right.

Starting in March 2020, studies began to show that smokers were under-represented among COVID-19 patients, suggesting that something in tobacco may offer protection against SARS-COV-2 infection. The evidence remains inconclusive, but it seems that some public health experts and journalists don't want to get to the bottom of this mystery.

A virion is “the complete, infective form of a virus outside a host cell, with a core of RNA or DNA and a capsid.” It is the infectious form of the virus as it moves between cells and hosts. A year plus into the COVID-19 pandemic, and we still do not know the number of virions necessary and sufficient to cause an infection – a new study, at least, puts us into the ballpark.

The first general alarm about the lethal effects of community air pollution was sounded in London in December 1952 during a severe fog episode that shut the city down and flooded hospitals and morgues. Subsequent media discussions about the benefits of cleaner air often cite the World Health Organization's global estimate of 7 million air pollution-related deaths annually (about 12% of the total), primarily based on studies of long-term mortality differences among US cities during previous decades. More recent publications have focused on short-term temporal associations. So how do long- and short-term analyses relate?

What if you could knock someone off merely by thinking about it – and no way to trace those thoughts to the crime? And more horrendous still: what if you could harm someone because of some subconscious desire, one that you weren’t even aware of? This isn’t the stuff of science fiction. It might even be possible now.

“Maximum containment laboratories, commonly referred to as biosafety level 4 (BSL4) labs, are designed and built to work safely and securely with the most dangerous bacteria and viruses that can cause serious diseases and for which no treatment or vaccines exist.” 

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a favorite tool of skeptics aiming to spread immunization fears. As it turns out, VAERS has actually helped ensure the safety of FDA-approved shots.

Benzene, a known carcinogen, was detected by a new company called Valisure, in hand sanitizer this past winter. Now, the company has detected it at various concentrations in sunscreen. Are the risks the same? Probably not.

Organized medicine, and by that, I mean healthcare with all its players, institutions, and systems, is continuing to undergo seismic shifts. Those related to COVID-19, like video visits or increasing acknowledgment of socioeconomic determinants of our health, get the headlines. But the changes to the business of medicine are rapidly increasing, will affect us far sooner, and I am afraid, for far longer. What are we sacrificing on the altar of efficiency and access?

As the debate over the origins of SARS-COV-2 rages, the case for silencing social media users grows weaker.

Drinking cholera, culture wars, let's put a hydra in a blender and see what we get [spoiler alert: no organisms are harmed], the science of gerrymandering.

We learn more and more every day about the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that live within us and support us. It's our own personal world: the microbiome. And researchers have identified ecologic niches with varying microbial occupants. And it seems that cities have unique microbiomes, too.

I've written numerous times that when it comes to supplements, you can throw both common sense and science out the window. Up is up and so is down. Somehow, I’ve been laboring under the notion that I don't really have much else to write about this topic. That was until a leisurely stroll up and down the aisles of a CVS store. And an existential thought experiment at no extra cost.

A recent survey found that fewer than 40% of Americans trust their federal public health agencies. Could “mission creep” into issues such as climate change, gun violence, and racism rather than a focus on traditional public health issues be a cause? Did mission creep impact our response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

It's been well established that virus transmission is much less likely to occur outdoors than in poorly ventilated indoor spaces. Can we estimate how much airflow is needed to make an environment safe?

Smoking cigarettes is stupid, involving financial and, more importantly, significant health costs. While there are several “drivers” to the smoking habit, including sociability and status (especially during those rebellious teen years), could we agree that nicotine is, by far and away, the most significant component of chemical dependency?

The anti-biotech group U.S. Right to Know has launched a crusade against Bill Gates, warning of his dangerous agenda for global food production. Unfortunately, the facts complicate the David vs. Goliath narrative the group is pushing.

There has been a small incidence of diffuse clotting, especially in atypical body sites, like the central vein draining the brain, among some AstraZeneca and J&J COVID-19 vaccine recipients. A newly released pre-print suggests a possible underlying biologic cause.

Buying from your nearby farmer's market offers a number of important benefits. Environmental sustainability and local economic growth are not among them, according to a new review of the evidence.

Phase III trials put the efficacy of the two earliest COVID-19 vaccines in the mid-’90s, certainly more than we had hoped. The word on the media “street” has been that vaccinations result in fewer hospitalizations and no deaths. The CDC is now reporting on “breakthrough infections” since the beginning of the year. 

The virus from Wuhan, can something be "partly false," Skynet is increasing real, are fungi our friends, does our soul live within our network?

Despite increasing evidence that vaping is safer than smoking, uncertainty surrounds the long-term effects of electronic cigarette use. Many in the tobacco control field have used the lack of data to speculate about these unknown risks. Here's a better way to deal with the uncertainty.

As more and more of the US population is vaccinated, we are not clutching our vaccine supplies so tightly. We are beginning to send them to others in need. There is a great deal of talk about the costs, and you know, somewhere, some “bean counter” is doing a cost-benefit analysis. 

There seems to be a reproducibility “crisis” in the sciences, where the results obtained by one group of researchers cannot be reproduced by another, putting the validity of the original work in doubt. What is the fate of those papers? Do they languish in some academic backwater hell lining birdcages?

Advances in genetics have been revolutionized in the last few years. First came CRISPR, which can edit single genes, possibly preventing diseases with a single genetic determinant – raising the possibility of gene editing of children. CRISPR is too immature to be commercialized for this purpose, and this debate is speculative for now. But genome-wide association studies (GWAS) - which assesses the entire genome and can identify multiple genetic markers predictive of disease -- have made landfall and are being commercialized for that purpose.