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From a November 16, 2001 article by Theresa Kilen in North Carolina's Elkin Tribune, recounting an elementary school assembly to discuss bioterrorism fears:
[A] student asked if a person could get smallpox and anthrax at the same time.
"Yes," [Dr.] John Williams answered. "But I would have to compare the chances of that happening to a person having a bomb dropped on them and getting hit by a train at the same time."

America's food supply is among the safest and most abundant in the world, thanks in part to a variety of technologies used to safeguard it. Nonetheless, in the last decade or so there has been an increasingly vocal minority that claims our foods are simply not as healthful or nutritious as they used to be. One of their targets is milk.
The Value of Pasteurization

Public fear is often disproportionate to real risks. Take the cases of staph and, on the other hand, the "killer mold" that has been in the news so much lately.
Staph

Is there an "epidemic" of autism? Are vaccinations or dental fillings to blame?
Lately the media has loudly featured, with more noise than facts, the increase in reported cases of autism and the unproved allegation that the mercury derivatives in some vaccines and dental fillings have caused this increase.
We seek ways to improve the condition of those with autism, but enthusiasm mustn't imperil sound science. Wrong answers can make things worse, wasting time and squandering resources.

Steve Milloy's Fox News column on ACSH's new book
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By Thomas R. DeGregori

"Eating closer to nature" has become the latest imperative of the food faddist. To some, this means eating food raw (and not irradiated) whenever possible, which carries considerable risks. Raw can be dangerous, since the largest source of salmonella in the United States is uncooked sprouts, which cannot be rendered safe by any means (including being washed with chlorine). And irradiation probably wouldn't be popular with the raw foods crowd.

The Bush administration, in an astonishing change of policy, is preparing to abandon its previous resistance to widespread "pre-attack" vaccinations and offer the smallpox vaccine to all Americans.

When my friend Ted, who is very skeptical about democracy, sees a crazy person or an idiot, he likes to say, "Remember: that person gets one vote, and you get one vote." The past few weeks have been full of events that make you wonder about the wisdom of the masses but the elites don't come off looking so clever, either:

See also:
* Are Children More Vulnerable to Environmental Chemicals?

I wrote a big essay called LIBERTARIANS, SMOKING, AND INSANITY: How Ideology Affects Ideas About Freedom and Health a few months ago, suggesting that even those who defend the right to smoke including my fellow libertarians should acknowledge that smoking is a very bad idea, often fatally so (see ACSH's booklet, Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You).

The Bill Moyers PBS show NOW got one important thing right about genetically-modified crops. "There's no scientific evidence that eating these ingredients hurts our health," says narrator Mark Schapiro in the segment "Seeds of Conflict," which aired earlier this month. Even Moyers' introduction muted the usual "Frankenstein foods" tone of such stories, contrasting "the surprises of nature" with "the precision of science."

I. Bits and Pieces
Where was I...? Can't remember, but I try. Relatives making such a hew and cry, I feel like I'm the sane one amidst neurotic plagues.
No, I shouldn't be fazed, And that's not how the thing's phrased: It's neuritic plaques that have left me dazed, These brain-addling indicators of Alzheimer's disease.
II. Land of the Lost

If you've finally become numb to the constant health warnings from activists and the media, it's easy to forget just how steady the drumbeat of doom is and how often its rhythms are calculated to frighten us about things near and dear to us such as food, babies, and breasts.

Sometimes to keep things organized, it's best to jot down a list. So, faced with a flurry of news items and e-mails about unscientific goings-on, I find myself filing them according to the political philosophies of the people responsible for the goings-on. All of them are in some sense "greens," but I discern seven distinct types or subspecies, if you will. It's worth noting how their priorities differ. (I suspect this list will come in handy in the future.)

Much as famine relief organizations are getting tired of ignorant anti-biotech protesters, the grown-ups at the World Health Organization are getting tired of the reckless kids at Ralph Nader's group Public Citizen. The WHO angrily denies Public Citizen's report claiming that irradiating food to kill bacteria is dangerous (see ACSH's booklet on the topic as well):

When is the truth misleading? When it's on a food label.

The World Health Organization has released World Health Report 2002, one of its most ambitious projects ever (see: http://www.who.int/whr/2002/overview/en/), and it helps underscore the fact that big, obvious health threats do far more damage than the obscure or hypothetical risk of the week. As the WHO's introduction says:

From an October 21 MSNBC.com article about an appetite suppressant drug that had the side effect of causing erections:
"The [body] tends to use the same signals over and over" for different jobs, said Philip F. Smith of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

On October 27 the New York Times published a story from the Associated Press newswire stating that the USDA had approved the used of irradiated meat in the national School Lunch Program. We here at ACSH applauded the move, since it would help protect some of the most vulnerable parts of the population from bacterial contamination of meats. We even posted a press release to that effect. But don't look for the press release today we had to take it down, because the AP story wasn't true.

It's not every day that one of our projects here at the American Council on Science and Health moves people to write poetry. Well, actually, we've posted some ACSH-themed poetry, but rarely has anyone outside the organization written poetry about us, but now the Heartland Institute has.

While AIDS is the deadliest sexually-transmitted disease, we easily forget how much more widespread other STDs are. Today, there are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, roughly one out of every 345 people. It has rightly gained mass media attention and come to dominate sex education materials. Let's take a look at the numbers on some other scourges, though:
65 million, or 1 out of every 4 people: The number of people living with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) in the United States.

Breast cancer is the number one diagnosed cancer for women in the United States and second only to lung cancer in cancer-related deaths. There is much uncertainty surrounding the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer: Are mammography and breast self-examination effective methods of detection? Should treatment include lumpectomy or mastectomy? Chemotherapy, radiation, or both?

Based on a a Scientific Review Paper by John P. Blass, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, Dementia Research Service
Burke Medical Research Institute