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While we all enjoy cleaner air and less airborne particulate matter is always better than more, public health policies must be based on demonstrated human health benefits.

Reducing tumors in laboratory mice is not one of them

Because of the journal’s (Nature) publication paywall, we are limited to the study’s abstract. Chief among the missing detail is any description of the PM2.5 exposures involved, such as duration, frequency, concentration, or composition, or whether the particles were collected from ambient sampling filters or produced in a laboratory. The abstract only says that “4 within-country cohorts...

What do you do when the evidence doesn't support your conclusion? There are just two choices: admit you were mistaken and adjust your views to conform to the data or tie yourself in knots trying to safeguard your preferred conclusion from facts that simply refuse to cooperate. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released the 2020 results from its Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program, and our environmentalist friends have sadly, though predictably, attempted to deny the obvious conclusion that follows from the FDA's analysis: pesticide residues on food still pose minimal risk to human health.

Anti-pesticide activist and ally to corrupt trial lawyers...

Are you an adult capable of making informed decisions to protect your health? If you live in New York City, the answer is “no.” That's because NYC is all but requiring its residents to get a COVID-19 vaccine. “New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio mandated inoculations for a range of indoor venues at a news conference,” CNBC reported on August 3, “requiring proof of Covid vaccinations from employees and customers of indoor eateries, gyms and entertainment centers.”

The authorized COVID-19 vaccines are safe for the vast majority of people and remarkably effective; their rapid development is a testament to the capabilities of modern science. My wife and son got one, and so did I...

ACSH was founded in 1978 to fight back against misinformation in the media, primarily involving the safety of food and "chemicals." We have been debunking "fake news" decades before the term came into existence.

As you might expect, calling out bullsh** has caused us to rack up quite a list of enemies. But if one can tell the character of a man by who his enemies are, then ACSH is certainly doing something right. We are proud that charlatans like Dr. Oz and public health scourges like anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO activists consider us an enemy. This proves (to us, anyway) that -- to the best of our ability -- we are on the side of evidence-based science and policy.

This makes our enemies mad. They know they can't debate us on scientific grounds, so they go after us with ...

It’s early, but The Atlantic is already in the running for worst science article of the year. Using a combination of cherry-picked research and bizarre political advocacy, the magazine has published an article with the outrageous clickbait headline calling alcohol "America's Favorite Poison."

It goes downhill from there, with one dubious, context-free claim after another. Let's go through them, one by one.

Today, warnings about the devil drink will win you few friends.

TRUE. The reason is because America is tired of scolds. We have a culture in which "being offended" is a badge of honor. Busybodies police our...

Bashing sugar is all the rage in nutrition.

A Google search for "sugar causes cancer" returns 133,000,000 results, some more dubious than others. But in the last 20 years or so, many researchers and health commentators have moved beyond implicating sugar as a cause of life-threatening disease to blaming it for more mild concerns, even acne.

According to a new epidemiological study,...

In the Beginning.

1952 was a Dickensian winter in a Britain still recovering from World War II. The unusual cold meant more household coal burnt for heat; London's air stagnated from a warmer layer atop colder surface air, creating dense fog and noxious air pollution. Visibility dropped to near zero, animals died, and cinema projections couldn't reach the screen. Over the next four days, 4,000 people died from the pollution, and an estimated 100,000 were sickened. New York City suffered similar stagnations in 1953 and 1962, and Los Angeles had severe smog problems in the 1950s.

Those events led to Clean Air...

California is a trendsetter.  

It’s home to world-class wine, championship basketball teams, beautiful weather, and legendary cities like San Francisco. But my home state, sadly, is also a trendsetter when it comes to wrongheaded public health policy. There’s no better example of this than Proposition 65, a law that has cost California businesses close to $300 million as of 2016.

Originally approved by voters in 1986, the law empowers the state government to regulate the use of chemicals, over 800 and counting, that it deems toxic to human health and the environment. Scientific shortcomings aside, the language of Prop. 65 has exposed California’s businesses to an...

"Lying" is considered one of those words civilized people should never say. That's why politicians never use it. Instead, their opponents are "misinformed" or "misspeaking" or "using alternative facts." 

Well, the time for civility is over. Journalist -- if we can actually call him that -- Danny Hakim is lying to you. And it's not his first rodeo, either. He's built quite a track record for himself at the New York Times, publishing distorted information about GMOs and comparing agricultural pesticides to "Nazi-made sarin gas." 

Now, Mr. Hakim has written an...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been grooming selected journalists to give favorable treatment to government findings, and even FDA ad campaigns, by inviting them to elite briefings that other journalists could not attend – or did not know even existed – as long as these special friends in journalism played by a strict set of FDA-friendly rules, as detailed in an exposé by Charles Seife in Scientific American, which confirmed what outsiders had long suspected.

One of those obey-to-play rules was that journalists were not allowed to seek comments from outside experts, unless they were specifically approved by the FDA. In other words, journalists were...