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We learned last weekend in a front-page New York Times story that the United States poultry industry has quietly begun to "bow to the demands of public health and consumer groups" by significantly reducing the use of antibiotics that are fed to healthy chickens. Antibiotics have been used for decades as a means of preventing infection in chickens and promoting an accelerated pattern of growth.
Is this move in the interest of promoting public health? And will consumers pay a price for the elimination of these chemicals?

Americans are terrified of even tiny amounts of toxic substances, but apparently they'll make an exception if, say, injecting the toxin that causes botulism into their faces helps fight wrinkles.

Consumers are often seduced by the widespread use of the descriptors "safe" and "natural" by producers and marketers at times with quite deleterious health effects. Thus, in 1995, a woman required a liver transplant after overconsumption of tea made from the chaparral plant. And heart transplant patients learned the hard way that supplements of St. John's Wort could interfere with the immune suppressant they must take to prevent rejection of their transplanted organs.

New laws limit the amount of money that tobacco companies have to post as a bond while court judgments against the companies are being appealed (normally in most non-tobacco cases the defendant has to put up the entire amount of the damages awarded to the plaintiff while the appeal fight is going on). Such laws have been passed in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Wisconsin and introduced in other states. American Lung Association president John L. Kirkwood reacted:

Authoritarian governments killed some 100 million people during the twentieth century. Simon Chapman, in an essay on Tobacco.org, notes a similarly lethal but less hotly debated menace:
"Between 1950 and 2000, smoking caused about 62 million deaths in developed countries...but they fail to create a sense of urgency in the media, policy-makers, or the public. As Joseph Stalin argued: 'A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.'"

Steve Milloy in his weekly Foxnews.com column, commenting on conflicting NCI mammography advice:
"What's a woman even her physician to make of this? Is this the National Cancer Institute or the National Confusion Institute?"

The media continue to feature nonsensical statements about health, probably because health issues sell, and the editors lack appropriate scientific judgment.

It's time to get things straight in the crooked world of illegal drugs. As a parent of a son who occasionally experiments with illegal substances such as marijuana and "ecstasy," I fear most two events: (1) a phone call from a hospital emergency room saying that he is dead or dying, and (2) his becoming addicted to a drug that ruins his career, relationships, and health.

As parents around the country were getting their children ready to go to school this morning, ABC's Good Morning America (GMA) and CNN were both giving parents warnings about how their children get to and from school one about diesel fumes on school buses, the other about ill-fitting seatbelts. GMA went with the diesel fuel story, and that raises questions about how they prioritize health stories.

A recent survey of 225 leading general internists ranked the top ten medical innovations of the past twenty-five years, and four out of the top eight innovations were medications used to treat chronic and life-threatening diseases (per Fuchs in Health Affairs, Sept./Oct. 2001). While much of the current health care dialogue revolves around the high cost of prescription drugs, this report underscores the benefits of an innovative, research-oriented pharmaceutical industry and how their products have improved the lives of all Americans.

You have a healthy, balanced diet, are blessed with good metabolism, and are not at all overweight. And you certainly don't smoke. So who cares that you're a couch potato? Like most Americans, you don't think you're at risk for heart disease.
But new research published in the January issue of the American Journal of Hypertension suggests that being thin alone is not enough to protect your heart. You need to be active too. The benefits of being physically active go well beyond burning calories.

See also http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/442554

Executive Summary

We don't necessarily agree with everything on these sites, but they're generally pro-science, and we like having them around (and for more links, see: http://www.acsh.org/about/pageID.14/default.asp ):
AgBioWorld: Dedicated to bringing agricultural biotech to the developing world.
http://agbioworld.org/

Blogborygmi.com: Nick Genes and company.

You can't blame parents for erring "on the safe side" when it comes to their children's health. Unfortunately, parents aren't always good judges of what the "safe side" is.
A recent increase in fear of vaccinations is a case in point. The journal Pediatrics reports that parents' philosophical and religious objections to vaccinations have been a factor in most of the tetanus cases encountered in a Stanford study. A growing number of parents have also become concerned about extremely rare side effects from vaccinations and are choosing not to vaccinate their children.

The oft-heard refrain from casual defenders of mystical and supernatural beliefs is that it "doesn't make any difference and doesn't do any harm" if people believe in things that may not be true, as long as it makes them happy. Time and again, though, supernatural beliefs do affect people's behavior in ways that in turn affect their health.

One often hears from artists or religious believers that science drains the magic and mystery out of the world, making it a less pleasant place. But what about all the times, less often philosophized about, when science reveals the world to be less dark than we imagined? Specifically: What if Count Ugolino did not eat his own children and feast on the brains of a bishop?

Why not just regulate everything as much as possible, wrapping all human activity in a loving cocoon of safety and security?
It must be remembered that regulations are not just friendly suggestions. They are commands backed up by fines and jail sentences. Before overriding individuals' right to make their own choices, we should be exceedingly confident that they are being forced to do something extremely beneficial that could not have been achieved in any gentler manner.

British conservative journalist Roger Scruton came under fire in recent weeks after admitting that he has taken money to write positive articles about the tobacco industry.
For free-marketeers, who defend the right of individuals to make free choices in a marketplace, constrained only by property rights, it is tempting to say that Scruton's error calls into question only his journalistic integrity, not his philosophical principles. But is it that simple?

Nine years of good TV and bad science is coming to an end. The X-Files has been cancelled and will end in May.
It was the best science fiction TV series of all time, with better acting, writing, and above all cinematography than any of its kin. True, when it started it had the second-rate feel of one of those syndicated series shot in Canada that only appears in late-night timeslots, sort of like Tales from the Darkside, but it grew into something much more polished and much more influential.

Something in the water, The neighbors all lament. Can't trust the companies, Can't trust government.
But we know, you know, they know, Though science can't say why we're sick, We'll ferret out the truth This isn't just some lawyer's trick.
Hired that lawyer who wrote A Civil Action, Played in the film by John Travolta. Without him digging up the truth, You think the companies would've told ya?

When a fifteen year-old of Middle Eastern descent who expressed sympathy for Osama bin Laden crashed a small, stolen plane into a Tampa skyscraper last month, killing only himself, few expected acne medication to get the blame. In fact, most people probably thought they had a rough idea what caused the incident: some combination of politics and youthful emotional instability.

A lot of health-related politics has less to do with philosophy than with tribal allegiances. Those tribal allegiances are strong and make people disinclined to listen to each other or to examine the weaknesses in their own arguments.
In a saner, calmer world, for instance, one probably would not have to deal with people who regard it as un-American to avoid eating beef fat nor with people who think that evil corporations will destroy the world merely by sewing genetically-modified corn.
But here we are.

Last month, like most months, saw advances and setbacks in biotechnology.
The cloned sheep Dolly appeared to be developing arthritis, but Japanese researchers found cloned mouse embryos in better shape than previously feared. The best news may have been the cloning of so-called "knockout pigs," pigs modified to eliminate a gene that in normal pigs prevents their organs being transplanted into humans. The worst news was the long-anticipated convening of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Sometimes, a national crisis strikes a sudden reminder of mortality that makes the average citizen stop and rethink his priorities. So it was for many of us recently when President Bush choked on a pretzel.
Indeed, I declare Bush's pretzel-choking incident the rebirth of irony.
After months of Americans fearing death by terrorist pilot and death by anthrax threats, frankly, too large and horrible to be genuinely funny along came the pretzel incident to remind us of three important truths: