Search results

The following letter from an ACSH Advisor appeared in the March 11, 2002 Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick courted African countries' support for biotechnology-derived crops while on a grand tour of Africa last month. Before the trip, he accused the Europeans of "going around Africa and trying to scare people," and he blasted biotech's adversaries, calling their opposition "equivalent to that period when people were opposed to machines."

A March 15th article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "In Europe, Prescription-Drug Ads Are Banned and Health Costs Lower" suggests that prescription drug advertising is the reason for high health care costs. With talk of the European Union easing its ban on direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies, many consumer groups and European officials fear that increased spending on advertising will result in higher prices on prescription drugs, squeezing already tight healthcare budgets. However, a basic economics lesson would teach them that such worries are unfounded.

There are organized marches nationwide to raise money to find a "cure" for breast cancer. Each day, the volume gets turned up on the debate over the usefulness of mammography for finding and "curing" cancer. Even the United States Post Office had a stamp advocating research to "cure" breast cancer.
Ironically, however, the real progress against breast cancer is taking place in another sphere: chemoprevention of this disease.

Very early this morning, San Diego Padres outfielder Mike Darr, age twenty-five, was killed when the vehicle he was riding in rolled over on an interstate highway in Arizona. Another man in the vehicle, twenty-three year-old Duane Johnson, of Reno, Nevada, was also killed in the accident.
It appears Darr was the driver of the vehicle and that the accident was alcohol-related. Darr and Johnson were not wearing seat belts and were ejected and killed. Another passenger in the back seat was wearing a seat belt and was not seriously injured.

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday examining the latest trend of fortifying foods with extra nutrients. The article quotes ACSH advisor Dr. Adam Drewnowski, a nutrition professor at the University of Washington, who points out that the issue isn t so much whether these calorie-dense functional foods work, but how individuals perceive them: The trend is so new, we re waiting on this data, but because people assume their nutritional needs have been met, there s a chance they ll make poorer choices for the rest of their meal.

Nearly a hundred and fifty products making antimicrobial/antibacterial claims had found their way into the consumer market since 1996 (the terms antimicrobial and antibacterial are often used interchangeably, technically antimicrobials fight a variety of organisms while antibacterials target bacteria). Today, there are over seven hundred such products on the market.

The American Medical Association took out a full-page ad in the February 27 New York Times, chastising NBC for deciding to run hard liquor ads, putting impressionable teens at risk. The AMA has thereby compounded a mistake begun by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

My favorite way of putting risks into perspective is to consider the average loss of life expectancy they cause, LLE (indicated in parentheses throughout this article). I present here a brief catalog of these, taken from my paper published in the September 1991 issue of Health Physics Journal.

Caveat Emptor. Consumers and journalists beware Anti-biotechnology activists engaged in a week of "direct action" at Starbucks Coffee shops this week aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again.

While years of news reports and Hollywood productions have led the public to believe that industrial pollution in the environment is causing local "cancer clusters," areas where cancer cases are thought to be more prevalent, there is no evidence of a link between so-called "clusters" and exposure to trace environmental chemicals.

Science, like other disciplines, has the potential to be used for both good and bad. Approximately half a century ago, Nazi Germany's horrific abuses of scientific knowledge included experiments on unwilling human subjects. Today, Germany has done a drastic about-face. Lawmakers in Germany have just moved to ban the import of embryonic stem cells for research, seeing even the most microscopic flecks of human tissue as people or partial-people, potential victims that must be safeguarded. Experimentation on humans, the reasoning goes, was ghoulish in the 1940s and is equally ghoulish today.

In the industrialized, modern world we've come to take a certain minimum level of public health so much for granted that it's easy to forget how much the history of the world has been shaped by disease.

The Oscar nominees were announced this month. One of the films up for Best Picture deserves some credit for acknowledging the complicated costs and benefits of going off one's medication: A Beautiful Mind. Another is perhaps the best depiction one could hope for of a mythic, pre-scientific past in which no one has to worry about such decisions and magical healing methods abound: Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Why do news reports sometimes suggest that men can lower their risk of prostate cancer with changes in behavior, such as diet modification or changing the frequency of sexual activity?

Is there a difference between objective reporting and "balanced" reporting?

If the Senate follows the House's lead and bans all human cloning, it launches a war that will have a real human body count especially among diabetics and Parkinson's sufferers and will produce considerable political fallout, especially for Republicans. In the end, it may be a war fought over the Islets of Langerhans. Those are the clumps of pancreatic cells that make insulin, and they're a frequently-cited example of the sort of cell that cloning could be used to produce.

You have to admit: Law firms defending the behavior of cigarette companies, especially from 1950-1980, really have their work cut out for them. Their mission is to defend a client who for decades systematically misrepresented the truth about cigarette smoking and health.

Oh, no. As if smoking weren't dangerous enough, now comes tobacoo genetically-modified to entrap and sicken us more effectively.

It is difficult to enter any local drug store or grocery and not be intrigued by the nutrition bar aisle. Who wouldn't be tempted by such claims as, "PowerBar Harvest, a great way to kick start your day with the natural energy and nutrition that powers world class athletes"? Others are targeted more towards female consumers, ones looking to celebrate life with every bite: "OASIS is the new nutrition bar from BALANCE, designed uniquely for women.

A couple of weeks ago, we alerted our readers to a recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association underlining the potential problems of unsupervised use of herbal and other dietary supplements. We noted that at least some of these products could potentially interact with prescription and other pharmaceuticals with unforeseen adverse effects on consumers. In addition, the products themselves are not closely regulated in this country, and safe or effective dosages are not necessarily known.

As noted by reader Meredith Kapushion, PETA, an animal rights organization opposed to hunting and the use of animals in medical experiments, is now suing New Jersey for having too many deer calling the burgeoning deer population a threat to "public safety," in large part because a deer wrecked PETA's Honda Civic. Here is an excerpt from the group's letter to the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, threatening to sue for over $6,000 in damages:

The following letter from ACSH's medical director appeared in today's Wall Street Journal
To the Editor:

Based on a position paper written by John C. LaRosa, M. D.
President, State University of New York Health Science Center
Brooklyn, New York, USA

Tattooing and body piercing are somewhat trendy now, having gained popularity in the 1990s. However, these forms of "body modification/body art" are anything but new. Both have been around since ancient times and are practiced in many cultures. Although their popularity attests that millions of customers feel both procedures are worth doing, there are some potential risks and complications.
Tattooing

Some reports in the media have suggested that sexual activity increases the risk of prostate cancer. "The evidence, however, is still far from conclusive," says Carmen Rodriguez, MD, MPH, senior epidemiologist and director of the Lifelink Blood Collection Study for the ACS. Dr. Rodriguez believes that there is no consistency in the research. "It is an interesting and possible real association," Rodriguez notes, "but not an established risk factor."