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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.

Does anyone remember when CBS used to be a respected news organization that did its own research or at least quoted independent experts? Or even conducted interviews? When it comes to health and science news, alas, it seems like they ve been reduced to rewriting alarmist or sensationalist press releases.

Activists are yet again trying to demonize high-fructose corn syrup, this time with a new study that purports to find a higher prevalence of diabetes in countries whose populations seemingly consume more of the sweetener than other countries. The study found that the rate of type 2 diabetes was 20 percent higher in those countries where HFCS was used commonly.

You may want to think twice before you drink that glass of grapefruit juice with your morning medications. A new study appearing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal noted that there has been an increase in the number of medications being sold that may cause serious side effects when combined with grapefruit juice. ACSH s Dr.

There may be yet another reason for individuals with elevated levels of blood cholesterol (especially LDL, the bad cholesterol) to jump on the exercise bandwagon, according to new research. A study which included over 10,000 veterans with such lipid abnormalities, classified individuals into four fitness levels ranging from least fit to highly fit.

Efforts by radical food activists to force labeling of genetically engineered foods rejected recently by California voters are also destined to fail in court, ACSH friend Dr. Henry Miller predicts in a letter appearing in Tuesday s Wall Street Journal.

Last year over 300,000 U.S. teenage girls gave birth a decrease over previous years, but still a rate higher than any other developed country. Now the American Academy of Pediatrics says pediatricians should routinely give teen girls prescriptions for emergency contraception, commonly known as the morning after pill, such as Teva Pharmaceutical s Plan B One-Step.

As many as one in 88 children and one in 54 boys have a form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. A new study attempts to pin the rise in autism to exposure to air pollution during pregnancy but it s a statistically invalid junk study, ACSH experts say.

Ohio hospitals are going to bat for their patients, enacting strict measures to make sure all their workers get flu vaccines. The Columbus Dispatch details how hospitals in the Buckeye State are withholding raises, cutting off computer access and disciplining workers who refuse the shots. Cincinnati-based TriHealth, which operates three area hospitals, has even threatened to fire 150 employees who fail to get vaccinated by Dec.