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ACSH Dispatches Round-Up: Phosphorus, Colons, Soda, Gates's Mosquitoes, and More

February 13, 2009

Victories for Vaccines, Soda, Smokers, Cold Sufferers, Eggs, and Vacationers

Elizabeth Wade

Court rules in favor of vaccine safety

ACSH staffers are pleased that a special federal vaccine court followed the science and ruled against parents claiming that vaccines caused their children's autism. "The studies have been quite definitive on the fact that childhood vaccines have nothing to do with autism, and the three-judge panel commonly referred to as the 'vaccine court' seemed to exercise a very thorough analysis of the topic and came to the right conclusion," says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross.

ACSH's Jeff Stier notes, "We shouldn't rely on the courts to be the arbiter of science, but this decision is certainly good news. People who are...
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ACSH News Vol. 10 No. 1 2002

ACSH Hosts Media Symposium on Harm Reduction ...
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ACSH Dispatches Round-Up: Spring Brings Thoughts Unscientific

DISPATCH: Plastic, Longevity, Gender, and Vitamins

The Anti-Quote of the Day: The dangers of plastic bottles
"The truthful answer is that nobody knows" their full health impact yet, said David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health. "And because we don't know, it's prudent to avoid something that is avoidable." --_Boston Globe_, April 23, 2008.

ACSH on Fox News
ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan appeared on Fox News yesterday to discuss a new study about life expectancy in America. She emphasized that the study's primary conclusion was very good news: Overall, Americans are living longer than ever--with a seven-year increase in life expectancy between 1960 and the 1990s. But there are segments of the population in...
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ACSH Dispatches Round-Up: Breast Exams, Vaccines, Red Meat, Kellogg's, More

November 20th, 2009

EPA, Breast Exams, Cervical Exams
By Curtis Porter

Drs. Ross and Miller on the EPA
ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross and ACSH Trustee Dr. Henry Miller of Stanford's Hoover Institution have an article on Investor's Business Daily's Investors.com about the EPA under Lisa Jackson: The EPA's muddled machinations should not come as a surprise, because the agency long has been a haven for scientifically insupportable policies perpetrated by anti-technology ideologues in career and appointed positions. It has a sordid history of incompetence, duplicity, and pandering to the most extreme factions of the environmental movement, all of which appears to be accelerating.

Dr. Caplan on the USPSTF
Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for...
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Dubious D, Melamine, Smokeout, and More

MORNING DISPATCH 11/19/08: Dour Docs, Cancer Causes, Dire Diabetes, Smoke Scams, and Dementia Dissension

U.S. faces mounting diabetes cost
A new study estimates that diabetes will soon cost the United States over $200 billion per year. "Diabetes is very expensive and the cost will only increase as more people develop the condition," Dr. Ross says. Dr. Whelan agrees, "The coming wave of diabetes cases, which is linked to increasing obesity rates, is going to be overwhelming for our healthcare system."

Dr. Kava points out that the increase in Type 2 diabetes will reach many corners of medicine: "It's going to affect the number of kidney dialysis patients, the number...
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ACSH Dispatches Round-Up: Anthrax, Smoking Genes, and More

MORNING DISPATCH 8/15/08: Strokes, Risks, Babies, Cancer

Mice develop cancer after being predisposed to it
A new study alleges that common skin creams cause tumors in mice -- but only mice bred to be prone to skin cancer that were pre-treated with high levels of UV radiation. "They applied the creams after purposely making the mice susceptible to skin cancer," says ACSH's Dr. Ruth Kava. "So is it the cream or the pretreatment?"

She agrees with Dr. Karol Sikora, Medical Director of Cancer Partners UK, who said, "This is a pretty artificial situation with the mouse skin primed by a lot of UV light to develop cancer." For now, Dr. Kava...
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ACSH Dispatches Round-Up: From Fibromyalgia to Phthalates

February 11, 2008: Artificial Jarvik, Troubled Ledger, Fat Twins, Menaced Babies

¢Quote to Note: "I'm confused. The way they do these studies shouldn't the rats have died from cancer or something before they could become obese?" -- Comment by "OceanLover" on Lucianne.com News Forum about a study linking saccharin consumption to obesity in rats.

¢The Internet can never be wholly trusted for accuracy, especially when it comes to medical information (remember all of the autism videos on YouTube?). Therefore, ACSH staffers were surprised by the small degree of error found on breast cancer websites -- according to a study published in the journal Cancer it's only 5%.

...
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Bully for Milk

Humankind has been consuming cows' milk as nourishment for thousands of years. Such use has contributed significantly to the development of civilization. Yet outcries to the effect that cows' milk as food is unhealthful, even poisonous, to humans have occasionally been getting play in the American media. The roots of this incongruity are complex. They lie in the culture of abundance that characterizes the present-day United States. Much of the negativism toward milk relates far less to health concerns than to antagonism toward animal agriculture. Getting the public to believe that milk consumption is deleterious to humans can make commercial dairy farming disappear, and such a disappearance would gladden animal rights activists and some environmentalists.

In the...
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Our Conflicted Views on Conflict of Interest in Healthcare

“Patients have long been aware that many unseen dollars drive medical decisions and events.”

 

Introduction

Since the first time exchange of a chicken for medical care, there have been conflicts of interest, real or imagined, between “self-interest" and "altruism.” Recently JAMA devoted an entire issue to conflicts of interest (COI) in healthcare, within the healthcare community as well as for physicians facing outward, towards our patients.

Before summarizing those outward facing articles [1], consider the underlying problem of the dilemma between patient and doctor.

The patient, the person with a need, employs...
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Diagnosing President Trump's Medical Statement: 'Fit For Duty'

President Donald Trump is fit for duty - medically, mentally, cognitively, psychologically, emotionally, physically and otherwise. In quite frankly the most transparent briefing on presidential health in recent memory, White House physician Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson confirmed this at a press conference yesterday whose Q&A portion lasted nearly an hour when he released a verbal and formally written medical assessment that reflects a thorough, comprehensive evaluation.

Dressed in his official U.S. Navy military uniform, Jackson made clear the President insisted on full disclosure, "He said, 'I want you to get out there and I want you to talk to them and I want you to answer every single question they have.' " He was told Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was to give him the podium...
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