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Regulatory capture refers to a type of “corruption,” in which a member of a regulatory body goes on to join those they once regulated. It's best thought of as having the fox guard the hen house. Last week, the FDA’s “top” tobacco scientist left for ... Philip Morris International (PMI), the makers of, among other brands, Marlboro cigarettes.

This week we found that we had lost a member of the ACSH family to ocular melanoma, the wife of our past President Hank Campbell. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Hank and his family. We thought we would take a moment to review some information about this exceedingly rare disease.

What's worse? Getting health advice from an alternative medicine website advertising in a golf magazine or Dr. Oz? At ACSH these questions are par for the course.

We hear a lot about the tons of plastic that pollute our oceans, but the solution to this troubling problem gets much less airtime. Let's take a closer look at the answer. Hint: it isn't paper straws.

How are politicians similar to bacteria? ACSH advisor Dr. Henry Miller explains.

PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” provides a perfect example of how faulty risk assessment can lead to real-world consequences that destroy people’s lives. This happens when federal agencies do not consider relative risk in their analyses and are blinded to the real-world implications of their actions.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is once again warning consumers that their food may be tainted by "forever chemicals." Let's take a look at all the important details the activist group left out.

Cato Institute's Dr. Jeff Singer (also a member of the ACSH Scientific Advisory Board) is none too pleased with both the CDC and FDA and the way they've handled monkeypox. It seems lessons from COVID-19 have gone unlearned.

Joan Mitchell returns to the stage.
Is robotic automation making us safer?
Should we end aging?
The regulatory capture of the USDA

Anti-vaping activists have put themselves in an awkward position. They want to demonize e-cigarettes because, they allege, nicotine poses a risk to teenagers. But they also want teenagers to use nicotine gums and patches to quit smoking. What sense does that make? None.

Sri Lanka's ban on imported synthetic fertilizers and pesticides devastated the country's farm sector, causing mass food shortages that helped drive the president out of office—and out of the country. ACSH director of bio-sciences Cameron English appeared on the Lars Larson show to explain the situation in more detail.

This is some potentially exciting news coming from China: a Covid drug called Azvudine (originally an HIV drug) that appears to be quite effective in reducing symptoms from the infection. However, there are two problems: 1) The information comes from Chinese newspapers, not journals; 2) the science doesn't add up.

You can file this under “those who don't know history are destined to repeat it,” according to George Santayana. At least that was part of my takeaway on a Smithsonian article on coal, which, in the early 1800s was a new-fangled fuel. Understanding the slow acceptance of this fuel source may provide some context as today’s alternative sources come online.

Is widespread use of artificial sweeteners polluting the environment? If so, what do we do about it? Join us on the latest episode of the Science Dispatch podcast as we take a critical look at the evidence.

Suffering from "climate anxiety," some of America's entitled college students are working to get low-risk pesticides banned from their campuses, in a bid to slow global warming. They all need therapy and a basic science lesson.

Pain is one of our senses – like vision, hearing, or taste. It aids our survival by identifying noxious and harmful stimuli. But unlike the other sensations, it's ethically challenging for us to study pain. Instead, we rely on animal studies. Pain’s underlying physiology is understood, but not our experience of pain, unlike other sensations that we can readily share, like listening to music or watching a sunset. That difference makes it difficult to treat.

Last week, many in the community of pain patients and their physicians did a victory lap over the decision by the Supreme Court in the case of two pain specialists, Xiulu Ruan, MD, and Shakeel Kahn, MD. Their separate cases were joined, and the opinion of the “Supremes” was misinterpreted in some quarters. They were not found innocent; the Court found that the instructions to the jury were in error and remanded the case back for adjudication. I have been following the case for a long time now, and it continues to gnaw at me in a contrarian way.

Climate change has now largely supplanted COVID as the main source of hand-wringing and angst in the popular press. Carbon is directly involved in climate change through carbon dioxide (CO2) and airborne elemental carbon particles (EC). COVID-19 has an indirect impact as well. Here I add some details to the fray to insert some clarity and reason.

On February 22, 2022, Kensey Dishman died. She was thirteen years old. Doctors believe Kensey, a high-risk patient, died of COVID-19-related causes.  Kensey had asthma, a condition for which vaccination is recommended. Yet, despite her asthma, she wasn’t vaccinated and wasn’t masked. A week before her death, her school district removed mask mandates. Her choice was to refuse vaccination; her divorced parents were conflicted. Her mother and step-dad, vaccinated themselves, urged Kensey to get vaccinated. Her biological father agreed with her choice not to vaccinate. Normally thirteen-year-olds aren’t allowed to make significant health-related decisions for themselves. So, what happened here?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently came out in support of "regenerative" farming as a solution to climate change. There is little evidence to justify her advocacy.

Anti-pesticide activist Carey Gillam recently moderated a panel discussion about the weed killer glyphosate. I attended and took notes. Here's what I saw.

Tracking cookies, those bite-size snippets of code that log your internet behavior come in as many forms as recipes for chocolate-chip cookies. Let us make a few quick distinctions. Some “session” cookies are bound to your browser and expire when you close the browser. Other cookies can have “best-by” dates or may last forever, like Twinkies. More importantly to this study, some cookies are issued by the site you are visiting, first-party cookies; others, ghostwritten by obscure code, serve the need of external third parties. Those are the subject of some new research.

Since 2020 Dr. Roneet Lev has been doing podcasts called High Truths, most often about addiction and drugs. So, I was happy to participate in an episode about fentanyl. It turned into quite a bit more.

Ferdinand the Bull’s real-life model, Civilón
Geomythology pairing our cultural myths with geologic findings
What will food be like in the future, more like Soylent Green or Impossible Burgers – Oreos may foretell our food future.
Woke words

I am a child of the cold war. I remember being in second or third grade and hearing the teacher yell, “Drop,” as we were expected to take cover under our desks. I can remember the surging interest in bomb shelters and when I was old enough to laugh at the idea that “duck and cover” would have any value. Why the nostalgia? Because last week New York City released a public service announcement about how to survive a nuclear attack – valuable information in case one were to occur.