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The puzzle that is the cause of Autism is one of the internet s favorite conundrums. A google search into what causes autism will turn up 120 billion hits. Glyphosate and other pesticides are popular choices amongst

Inside Higher Ed is bucking the hurricane that has built up against Dr. Mehmet Oz after four American Council on Science and Health-affiliated doctors wrote a letter to Columbia University asking for him to be reprimanded for promoting alternative treatments and selling bogus cures as miracle products.

The Crane Independent School District in West Texas sent letters to parents confirming an outbreak of chlamydia in the local high school. District officials have reported at least 20 cases of the disease an estimated 1 in 15 students at the school have contracted chlamydia.

Eat This, anti-GMO fanatics! A new study from an international team of experts reports the remarkable finding of bacterial-mediated transgenic components in common sweet potatoes. Their conclusion: genetic modification is an evolutionary, beneficial phenomenon, same as it ever was.

The latest in health news: The very first GMO wasn't grown by a big corporation or in a lab, it came form Mother Nature, autism rates are not on the rase, but detection is, and a Texas high school without a sex-ed program is seeing an outbreak of chlamydia.

Continuing the assault on anti-scientific beliefs and quackery that he thoroughly eviscerated in his previous book, Do You Believe in Magic-The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, Dr. Paul Offit, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children s Hospital of Philadelphia, has now set his sights on another appalling practice the substitution of prayer for proper medical care.

The possible association between nut and peanut consumption and mortality rate in both Caucasian and Chinese individuals was examined by Dr. Hung N. Luu from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and colleagues.

Is chemophobia the fear of chemicals promoted by the forces of ignorance among the majority of Americans who are scientifically-naive on the threshold of winning the war? The past week gives disturbing indications that science is on the retreat.

In 2012, Washington state had an outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough). Nearly 5,000 people mostly babies and children caught the disease. Surprisingly, many of the affected adolescents had been vaccinated on schedule, a new study finds. The recent analysis of that epidemic, published in Pediatrics, reports that the effectiveness of

Back in February, several prominent medical associations made a recommendation that the newly FDA approved HPV DNA test should replace pap smears or co-testing (pap smear and HPV assay) as the primary mechanism for detecting cervical cancer for all age groups.

Football is an extremely popular sport in the United States. The number of boys playing football in the US is greater than the combined number of boys playing the second and third most popular sports, according to the National Federation of State High School Association (NFHS). Approximately 3 million youth athletes play

This week in health news: Oprah Network pulls the plug on the Dr. Oz radio show, the European Commission says sick cattle to be treated with homeopathy, and the FDA takes a closer look at the efficacy of antimicrobial soaps and hand sanitizers

The federal government took another small step in the battle to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In the same week the WHO released a statement on the growing global crisis of antibiotic

This week New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced an ambitious plan to significantly reduce the state s AIDS population. Several obstacles exist to achieving his goal of reducing the virus prevalence, but one many point out is the high number of people with an

A Columbia faculty Chair and even Oprah seem to be distancing themselves from Dr. Oz. It s about time, given both his unprofessional demeanor and potentially harmful medical advice on his TV show, and his attempt to distract attention from his own malfeasance.

The World Health Organization just issued a statement warning us that the world is failing miserably to adequately fight antibiotic resistance. Although the group does a very fine job in pointing out the consequences of this impending catastrophe, it fails to offer much in the way of a solution.

In his op-ed in Sunday s NYTimes, former anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas explains his conversion to supporting biotechnology as a means of feeding the world s increasing population, many of whom are or are fated to be malnourished without higher crop yields

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.

Gabriel Arana, Senior Media Editor at The Huffington Post, writes:

'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.

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.