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Drug overdose deaths rose in 2010 for the 11th straight year, killing over 39,000 Americans, according to new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nearly 60 percent of the overdose deaths 22,134 involved prescription medicines, rather than illegal narcotics. Three out of four medicine-related deaths involved opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin, and only 17 percent were suicides the larger fraction were accidental.

At the American Council on Science and Health, we promote the benefits of Tobacco Harm Reduction in helping smokers quit.

Josh Bloom, US News and World Report 2/4/13, "Mandate the Flu Vaccine for Healthcare Workers"

Paul Howard and Josh Bloom, Medical Progress Today Spotlight Feature "Is Big Pharma Hiding Data?"

More than 400,000 Americans have full or partial hip replacements each year, and the majority of them are women. Now, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women were also 30 percent more likely than men to need a repeat procedure within the three years following the initial surgery. However, this news is not nearly as dire as it appears.

When screening patients for lung cancer with CT scanning, a more restrictive definition of a positive result could produce fewer false positive diagnoses, with their attendant unnecessary follow-up studies, including biopsies and surgery.
This conclusion, from a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is based on a higher nodule-size threshold for follow-ups from 5 mm to 6 to 8 mm lesion size before starting a more intensive work-up.

In other public health news, the CDC s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, has shown an incredible decline in motor vehicle fatalities among persons aged 15-24 years.

This doesn t sound good. The Centers for Disease Control last week warned doctors to prepare for the arrival of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea from Asia, and avoid prescribing too many antibiotics for fear they may create superbugs.
Gonorrhea has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics, known as cephalosporins, which are getting less effective at treating it especially among men who have sex with men on the West Coast, the CDC says.

Deaths from lung cancer are set to surpass deaths from breast cancer in European women, and will become the leading cause of cancer deaths among women there, according to a recent study published in the journal Annals of Oncology.
In some countries, such as the U.K. and Poland, lung cancer has already become the main cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Lung cancer killed more women than breast cancer in the U.S. for decades.

Emergency contraception isn t a secret anymore. An estimated 11 percent of sexually active girls and women aged 15 to 44 have used the morning-after pill at least once, a new federal report says.
That comes to 5.8 million women, about half of whom said they used the pill because they had unprotected sex. The other half worried that their birth control method had failed.

In what seemed to be an attempt to update the statistics on the risk of alcohol-linked cancer deaths in the U.S., a study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that alcohol can be blamed for 20,000 deaths per year.

Neurostimulation should likely be offered to patients with Parkinson s disease earlier than it is, a new study suggests. Neurostimulation is sometimes called deep brain stimulation. For Parkinson s patients, the process involves implanting tiny microelectrodes in the brain to deliver stimulation pulses to the tissue. Then, an electrical pulse generator (PG) generates stimulation pulses, which is connected to the electrodes via microwires.

A study published this week in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism presented compelling data showing that the consumption of neither high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), nor sucrose (table sugar) at levels consistent with average daily consumption increased liver or muscle fat in humans.

Those individuals with hearing loss may want to pay attention to this. Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has found a strong association between hearing loss and dementia. His first study, published in The Archives of Neurology in 2011, looked at 639 subjects, ages 36 to 90 who were followed for 18 years.

Here is some good news for those of you among the millions taking statins you may not need to take them daily. Statins may have the same cholesterol lowering effects when given every other day, supported by the fact that it takes several weeks for cholesterol levels to return to baseline after treatment with statins is stopped.

Women planning to become pregnant, or even possibly becoming pregnant without planning, have long been advised to take a daily folic acid supplement because folic acid reduces the risk of neural tube defects spina bifida, among other conditions in their newborns.

Yesterday, Governor Andrew Cuomo yet again delayed making a decision on whether to allow hydraulic fracturing fracking in the state of New York.
Fracking has been under review by state regulators since before Mr. Cuomo took office in January 2011.

Biomedical researchers have long used mice in the lab to learn about human diseases and to test treatments. Now, a new study strongly suggests that mice are poor models for studying trauma or infections in humans.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg can now add reducing the salt content of foods to the long list of regulations he s espoused during his time in office, including reducing trans fats and imposing a ban on large sized sodas. His efforts to regulate salt began in 2010, when under his direction, 30 companies committed to reducing salt content in their products by 25 percent over a period of five years in an effort to lower consumers blood pressure and reduce incidence of heart attack and stroke.

A know-nothing from The New York Times believes that the pharmaceutical industry is intentionally hiding data from clinical trials. ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom and The Manhattan Institute s Dr. Paul Howard disagree. They don t buy claims that the pharmaceutical industry is burying data that would expose its products as expensive frauds.
Writing in Medical Progress Today Spotlight, they rebut a recent op-ed by Ben Goldacre:

In a recent New York Times article, reporter Denise Grady sheds light on a report stating that too little of the money spent on breast cancer research goes toward finding environmental causes of the disease and ways to prevent it.

The U.S. birth rate has hit a historic low, the Centers for Disease Control says. There were 12.7 babies born per 1,000 people in 2011, down from 13.0 live births in 2011. Back in 1950, the rate was 24.1.
Overall there were 1 percent fewer children born in the U.S. in 2011 than in 2010.

Researchers have reported the first U.S. cases of whooping cough caused by a bacterium that appears to be resistant to the vaccine.

Here s some good news for those promoting the use of e-cigarettes as a form of tobacco harm reduction. According to a survey conducted in 6,000 current and former smokers in the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain, e-cigarettes devices which provide nicotine in a benign vapor, geared towards helping addicted smokers quit are viewed as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes by 80 percent of those surveyed. The survey found though, that only 3 percent of respondents currently used e-cigarettes.

People who eat a southern diet, heavy on deep-fried foods and sugary drinks like sweet tea and soda, are more likely to suffer a stroke, according to a new study. This study began in 2002 when researchers began to administer food surveys to more than 20,000 people in the contiguous 48 states, sorting respondents into five different diet styles.