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The same mRNA technology that gave us effective COVID-19 vaccines could yield a new generation of highly protective seasonal flu shots. When will we see these upgraded influenza vaccines? Perhaps sooner than you think.

Mainstream news outlets have gone after COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with a passion. But when it comes to equally important science topics, they have no problem ignoring evidence and promoting conspiratorial nonsense. This blatant hypocrisy causes confusion and fuels the public's skepticism of science more broadly.

A malevolent troll named Paul Thacker has made a living smearing and harassing scientists on Twitter. With the blessing of editors Nikhil Swaminathan and Jennifer Block, the website Grist has now given him a platform to spread his lies.

A whopping 62% of Americans are afraid to share some of their political views because somebody might be offended. As we all know now, if you offend somebody, you can lose your job and have your life destroyed. Michael Shellenberger, a prominent environmentalist who believes that climate alarmism is misguided, is feeling the fury of the mob.

Completely banning alcohol would only prevent about 3.5% of cancer deaths. That, of course, means the other 96.5% of fatal cancers are caused by things other than alcohol. Given that cancer is the #2 leading cause of death in America, there's a good chance that you're going to die of cancer no matter what you do. So chill out and have a drink.

Many public health officials have called for mandatory vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The motivation for this policy is understandable, but forcing parents to immunize their kids emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. By incentivizing people to vaccinate and holding them legally accountable when they don't, we can preserve individual autonomy, maintain herd immunity and undermine the anti-vaccine movement.

With childbirth, the stakes are too high to add a risk factor or another hurdle. A healthy mom and healthy baby should be the goal of any delivery.

One of the many medical myths that we are bombarded with is the idea of "chronic Lyme disease." Lyme is real and can be serious if not treated. But attempts to "cure" chronic Lyme can be dangerous or even deadly, especially when long courses of antibiotics are given. Here's the latest on this from the CDC. 

1. A student at Emerson College has gone John Birch Society, alleging he just sort of knows fluoridated water must be bad for us because he read it somewhere on the Internet and thinks being contrarian to accepted science and medicine is journalism. Well, it is. Shoddy journalism, anyway, and the world is already deep in that.

To kick off our new interview series Making the Rounds, we invited surgical oncologist Dr. Ogori Kalu to our New York office for a Facebook Live video streaming session to help educate the public on breast cancer prevention. Take a few minutes to learn about the discredited myths, and to watch the interesting round-table discussion with this Stanford-educated doctor.

Postpartum depression is a very serious mood disorder that cannot be lumped together with the commonly reported "baby blues" and certainly cannot be helped by any service that is offered on a spa menu. However, certain spa owners are starting marketing campaigns that dangerously mislead new mothers.

When it comes to environmental politics, history and improved scientific understanding often fail to inform. And according to guest writer Angela Logomasini, an author and Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, alarmism and irrationality are prominent in the current debate involving flame retardant chemicals.

The FDA really doesn't want you taking pain meds. How strong is the agency's position on this? Pretty strong – enough to recommend that physicians receive extra education in alternative pain management methods. While that's fine in theory, one of the methods happens to be acupuncture, which is not fine at all.

Naturopaths have been and continue to push for federal reimbursements for their treatments and they often consider themselves as professional equivalents of actual physicians who have studied actual medicine. The "profession" should be considered what it is - a hobby.

Agricultural literacy is at a low level in the land of plenty. There may be a law that dictates an inverse relationship between abundance and knowledge about the source of the abundance. We do not burden ourselves with factual information about that which we take for granted, namely, food, health, and a comfortable life in a non-threatening world. As long as the fridge is full, the car always starts, and the TV keeps entertaining, why bother to know what makes all that happen?

A report from the Harvard School of Public Health is hitting the headlines hard today. The conclusion: Men who eat produce with pesticide residue have poorer sperm quality than those who don t.

Today, there is simply too much known in far too many diverse fields for any person to hold it all in their brain. This means that, no matter how smart one might be, there are times when we have to push the “I believe” button and simply accept the statements of others. The problem is that these others are too often wrong, the topic is too often very important, and the statements made are too wildly disparate. We feel we must choose, yet we don’t know how.

The "One Chip Challenge" – a ridiculous exercise in pain endurance – where people are dared to eat Paqui brand chips "flavored" with increasingly hot peppers may have been the cause of death of a 14-year-old boy who ate a single chip. But Paqui tries to portray their product as "healthy," for example, GMO-and-preservative free. What a bunch of BS.

The discourse about the link between diet and cancer can often be as convoluted as a tangled mess of spaghetti. If you were expecting definitive answers in the realm of nutritional science, the TH Chan School of Public Health discussion on "Reducing Cancer Risk Through Nutrition" will disappoint.

What does the word "healthy" mean to you? Do you consider yourself a healthy eater?  The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is updating the definition as a claim on food labeling. Will it amount to a hill of beans?

Did you know Bob Marley died of melanoma? Or, that Jimmy Carter was recently "cured" of metastatic melanoma? Many misperceptions abound with respect to skin cancer — specifically melanoma — so we will address them here with Part 1 of a two-part series. To debunk myths about who is at risk, discuss hot topics in the field and learn what treatments loom on the horizon, I enlisted the help of three leading melanoma researchers from The Wistar Institute —our nation’s first independent biomedical research facility where I am a member of the leadership council.

Reporters and science communicators commonly point to widespread COVID misinformation to explain why so many people are skeptical of vaccines and other infection-control measures. Bad pandemic takes clearly influence the public, but there's much more to the story.

Science journalism is plagued by several critical problems that jeopardize its credibility. If we want the public to be more science-minded, we have to correct these issues sooner rather than later.

When you have a baby on the way, everybody has "helpful" advice that isn't all that helpful. Most of it, in fact, is downright useless, and some of it is potentially very harmful. We'll start with the latter and revisit the useless in part two of this series.

Pesticides can be very dangerous; they're also vital tools farmers use to produce our food. Here's a guide to help you navigate the media maze of sloppy reporting on pesticide safety.