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Are those little guys under threat? A new study claims that there has been a significant and continuous 32.2 percent decrease in sperm counts among French men in the last 17 years. Researchers led by Dr. Joelle Le Moal from the Institut de Veille Sanitaire published their findings in the journal Human Reproduction.

For most women who have been treated for breast cancer, taking tamoxifen (an estrogen blocker in breast tissue) can cut their odds of recurrence but for how long to take the drug to maximize benefit, has not been clear. Now a new study shows 10 years of tamoxifen treatment is better than five, lowering the risk of recurrence by a quarter and the risk of dying by 29 percent.

Get ready to hear more about electronic cigarettes except about how they can possibly help people quit smoking. Some e-cig manufacturers are gearing up for an expensive ad campaign, the New York Times reports. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based NJoy Inc. is spending $12 to $14 million to promote its NJoy King, while Lorillard s BlueCigs has hired actor Stephen Dorff to promote their product.

Is the goal of eradicating breast cancer by 2020 unrealistic and overly ambitious? We were inclined to agree with a Nature editorial that said so, but one of our readers says no. Dr.

A federal appeals court in New York ruled this week that off-label drug promotion and marketing is free speech protected by the First Amendment. If the ruling stands, pharmaceutical companies will be able to legally market drugs for off-label conditions that they have studied but have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This has the potential to change the face of marketing of prescription drugs in America, and may affect everything from patient care to TV advertising.

It has long been said that salt contributes to high blood pressure and thus, the government s dietary guidelines recommend that the general population consume less than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day (about a teaspoon of table salt). This relationship, while unequivocally accepted by almost all of the public health and cardiology authorities, is again being questioned; it may be the case that these recommendations are not warranted for everyone.

Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today "Off Label Advice for Doctors- The Appeals Court is Dead On"
Off-label drugs-- those used for indications other than what the drug was originally approved for-- have been used for many years. Most of us have probably benefited from this practice, but despite this, it has been illegal for a pharmaceutical sales rep to even mention a possible off-label use of any drug to doctors.

Teen pregnancy is a hot topic in the media and pop culture these days, as attested to by movies including "Juno" to "Teen Mom 2" to "16 and Pregnant." Events of recent weeks may indicate this concern is finally cracking the shell around our public health leaders as well better late than never.

The U.S. flu season is off to the earliest start in a decade, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With higher-than-normal reports of flu coming in from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, this flu season could be a bad one.

No matter how many scientists explain that there is no real evidence suggesting that pesticides are harmful when used appropriately, they continue to be the subject of a number of health scares the most recent linking pesticides to food allergies.

The American College of Physicians Clinical Guidelines Committee has released a new evidence-based clinical policy paper revising the guidelines for upper endoscopy use in most patients. During the procedure, known as EGD among clinicians for esophago-gastro-duodenoscopy, a tiny flexible camera called an endoscope is inserted down the patient s throat so the physician can visualize the upper GI tract: esophagus, stomach and duodenum.

Sarah Kavanaugh, a 15-year-old Mississippi high school student, is making headlines with a petition she began that calls on PepsiCo. to stop using brominated vegetable oil in its Gatorade brand of sports drinks.

The evidence is mounting that routine hits during contact sports especially football and hockey can cause long-term brain injury, but somehow that news hasn t made it into the heads of hockey coaches, who continue to put young athletes at risk, according to a pair of new studies.

Last week, the respected scientific journal Nature published a superb editorial castigating the Breast Cancer Coalition, a nonprofit ostensibly devoted to reducing the toll of breast cancer. The editorial pointed out that the goal put forward by the BCC, to cure breast cancer by 2020 was irresponsible, given the complexity of cancer in general and breast cancer specifically.

Reading the mainstream media s coverage of the health and nutrition issue, you d be forgiven if you thought eating everything from red meat to burnt toast could cause cancer. But a new study shows many of these reports are nothing more than bogus sensationalism just as we ve been saying for years.

It is hardly surprising that The New York Times comes out with an anti-pharmaceutical screed on a regular basis. I usually just ignore them, but Thursday's article in Business Day was so slanted and amateurish that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to call them out.
The headline itself was the worst offender: "Brand-Name Drug Prices Rise Sharply, Report Says."

Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today 11/27/12, "Tami-flu the Coop? "
Roche has recently been taking considerable heat for not providing certain clinical data on Tamiflu (oseltamivir), its flu drug that has been on the market since 1999. During the 2009 H1N1 flu scare, hospitals, governments and many individuals were panic buying it, and some of them are not too happy about spending a load of money on something that doesn't work very well.

Weight loss surgery may not be a long-term solution for many patients with type II diabetes, as was once thought. A study published in the journal Obesity Surgery found that many of the obese type II diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery did not go into remission and of those who did, a third redeveloped diabetes within five years. This is a stark contrast from what has been publicized in the past.

Are the prices of brand-name drugs really increasing, as claimed in a report published by the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts? According to the report, which tracked commonly used drugs from September 2011 until September 2012, the price of brand-name medications increased 13 percent and the price of generic drugs decreased by 22 percent. Express Scripts chief medical officer, Dr.

Childhood obesity is a serious problem in the United States, affecting almost 18 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls aged between 2 and 19.

The European Food Safety Authority has joined us and scientists around the world in rejecting as junk a study purporting to link genetically modified corn to cancer in rats. The study by French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini was clearly a deeply-flawed, politically motivated effort to derail the vote against California s Proposition 37, which thankfully did indeed fail.

As recently as the 2009 swine-flu outbreak, authorities had to warn people against panic-buying Tamiflu over the Internet. My how the tide has turned these days Roche is under fire for not providing certain clinical data on the drug after researchers say there s little evidence it works.

For years doctors practiced bloodletting therapy, based on faulty assumptions and bad observations about its apparent benefits. Today medical science is more advanced or is it?

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has just unveiled a new website, BeTobaccoFree.Gov, and as usual those in charge have chosen to keep on demonizing reduced risk tobacco products such as smokeless, and electronic cigarettes. E-Cigarettes may contain ingredients that are known to be toxic to humans. Because clinical studies about the safety of e-cigarettes have not been submitted to the U.S.

It s the law of unintended consequences. In the 1990s, the U.S. switched from a whole-cell vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough) in favor of the acellular Tdap vaccine, in which the a represents acellular which also protects against diphtheria and tetanus.