Public Health

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning of possible Listeria monocytogenes contamination in l’Explorateur soft ripened cheese. This is pasteurized cow’s milk cheese, so at least it isn't raw unpasteurized milk causing illness yet again, and was made by in St. Simeon, France. It is sold in small, circular wheels (250g) with sell-by dates of May 7, 2019 and May 14, 2019. Product lot codes are 7742-H 057 and 77432-H 064.  Cheese labeled as such should be thrown away immediately. Listeriosis is a rare but serious illness usually caused by eating food contaminated with the bacteria…

     Tyler Clites holds a BS in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering from Harvard (2014) and a PhD from Harvard//MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology (2018). Presently he is a Post Doc in the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab where his research focuses on the development of novel techniques for limb amputation surgery with the goal of improving the connection between the biological body and a synthetic limb. The approach is known as the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI). Information on this exciting new technology can be found here and here.…

Just over a year ago I testified before a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in support of the iQOS device, a smoking replacement tool that heats tobacco but doesn't ignite it. I was completely aware of the optics of a guy running a science and health nonprofit asking the FDA to approve a product made by Philip Morris International, a longtime cigarette company, but it made complete sense for multiple reasons: I had seen the data they provided to FDA and the migration off cigarettes in Japan was 70 percent, far beyond e-cigarette nicotine vapor tools like Juul, and certainly well…

Poor people live in areas with more pollution, but pollution is relative in 2019. American air is actually incredibly clean, so clean epidemiologists have defined pollution down, from real smog (particulate matter 10 μm in diameter, PM10) to 2.5 microns (PM2.5) and even PM1.0 in hopes of getting the public to believe it is still a threat to life and that only more government money for statisticians will save us all.(1) Now epidemiologists have even begun to claim street noise is as harmful as smog. They call it the urban "exposome", but it really means we are all being exposed to junk science…

Testosterone is the main sex hormone in men. It’s best known for its role in the development of male sexual characteristics and physical features, but there are also many surprising and lesser known functions of testosterone that make it an important hormone in health and disease. Identifying whether someone has too much or too little testosterone can predict future diseases and even treat them. But knowing what is high, low or normal for an individual isn’t straightforward. Testosterone plays an important role in how male reproductive tissues – such as the testicles and the prostate –…

In the movie "Erin Brockovich", actress Julia Roberts portrayed a clerk who got energy company PG&E worried enough about a jury being scared of science they wrote her boss a giant check. Because Hollywood is in California, the state government was motivated to declare the compound harmful and put in tighter restrictions. The concern from the science community was that no one was being harmed. It's a slippery slope from demonizing a scary sounding chemical in water to doing the same thing to vaccines or weedkillers. Which is exactly what has happened, and California has led the way in both…

With a tricky disease like multiple sclerosis, where symptoms and MRI testing results can look like other conditions, such as stroke, migraines and vitamin B12 deficiency, it's common to be misdiagnosed with other things first. A new analysis of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before being referred to two major Los Angeles medical centers flipped the script; it found that 18 percent didn't have the autoimmune disease at all.   The results showed that nearly 18 percent of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before being referred to two major Los Angeles medical centers…

Blood pressure and stroke risk increase steadily with sedentary lifestyle, obesity and of course the biggest risk is age. Many want to optimize their time living to prevent debilitating injuries and epidemiologists are happy to find a statistical correlation for everything; that is why some embrace supplements, some embrace organic food, and some embrace alcohol use. It's never been shown to be true that modest alcohol use is a carcinogen (it is at high levels), in the same way no chemicals are harmful at trace levels ("the dose makes the poison") but there has long been a fad believing that…

When the Obama administration's Food and Drug Administration gave way to the Trump era, there were a number of positive changes in how the federal government treated smoking cessation tools that were not controlled by large corporations. They rolled back the arbitrary framing that claimed all tobacco was as harmful as cigarettes - except Big Pharma products like nicotine patches and gums. They accepted that adults should have all options available for quitting cigarettes or at least reducing harm. But there has been lingering concern about kids. Teens rebel, that has long been known, and if…

A recent paper caused a group of academics to shout the alarm about human food additives, even though their study was only in mice and there is no plausible biological hypothesis for how their results can be true. Welcome to 2019, where you just wave your hands and say "microbiome" and invoke jargon about immune cells and hope editors at increasingly desperate pay-to-publish corporate journals and then some journalists take the bait. We can shake our heads that the anti-vaccine movement is now so prevalent that a disease simulator/video game, "Plague, Inc.", is including anti-vaxxers in its…