Public Health

To the relief of the real science community everywhere, the era of Chris Wild is almost over at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). That means maybe they can get back to finding carcinogens rather than manufacturing them. Or not. The concern about Dr. Elisabete Weiderpass, recently voted in by the 25 member nations, was never about credentials, because all of the short-listed candidates have excellent credentials. Even Dr. Chris Portier, clearly too unethical to get the job, looks good on paper. The concern was instead about perception. Being married to Harri Vainio, an…

Pharmaceutical industry marketing of opioid products to physicians through non-research payments, which can include speaking fees and meals, was associated with greater opioid prescribing in a recent JAMA Internal Medicine article. Many opioid-related overdose deaths involve prescription opioids, and prescription opioids are often a person's first encounter, a gateway, to illicit use. Due to changes in government rules, marketing by the pharmaceutical industry directly to the public and  physicians has become widespread but marketing of opioids and its influence on prescribing is…

We in the rich societies of the world don’t hear a lot about aflatoxin. It is probably one of the single largest causes of cancer in the developing world – particularly in Africa. Around a half a billion people are at risk from this toxin in their diet. At high doses it can cause acute poisoning and death. It also causes cognitive stunting in children exposed to it. Aflatoxin is a natural chemical that is made by a fungus called Aspergillus that can infect crops like corn, peanuts and tree nuts particularly when there is damage by insects and/or stress from…

Homeopathy, a belief from 200 years ago that if you took something that mimicked the symptoms of a disease you could prevent a disease, or that extremely diluted water with a molecule of something will be curative, has never been shown to work in any clinical trial. Nonetheless, some people swear by it, much as people believe other placebos. What to do if your doctor recommends it? In the United States, a doctor is ethically forbidden from prescribing a placebo outside a clinical trial, but it is known some do. And lots of folk medicine/alternative medicine/integrative medicine people will…

A few weeks ago the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) released the results of the largest study ever conducted on bisphenol A (BPA).  The CLARITY Core study was conducted by senior scientists with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in their own laboratory in Arkansas known as the National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR). More important than size is the unprecedented scope of the study for this substance.  The laboratory animals were exposed to BPA from the beginning of pregnancy through the full lifetime of the offspring.  A wide range of BPA doses was…

Vegetarians are not winning in the public consciousness but they are certainly winning in media and academia. The reason is simple: claiming something is harmful is a great call to action whereas telling people they are healthier in the modern world than ever before won't raise money at all. The controversial group International Agency for Research on Cancer, which has been shown to have been hijacked by activists who didn't declare conflicts of interest, declared red and processed meat carcinogens on the same level as mustard gas, plutonium and cigarette smoking, and since California is…

At a press conference Saturday, a team of scholars presented data that sent an icy chill through the hearts of activists against science and medicine, like Pete Myers of Environmental Health News and Fred vom Saal, who sell natural alternatives to modern products which they claim are all "endocrine disruptors." They showed that regular exposure to lavender or tea tree oil was linked to abnormal breast growth in young boys - prepubertal gynecomastia - because the common plant-derived oils act as endocrine-disrupting chemicals.   An endocrine-disrupting chemical is a chemical in the…

If you’ve ever heard of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), and who hasn’t, you probably have the distinct impression that it’s highly toxic.  After a steady drumbeat of more than 15 years suggesting that BPA is linked to virtually every health effect known to man, how could you think any differently? There are literally thousands of studies on BPA in the scientific literature, many of which report biological effects of one sort or another.  But separate from the sheer volume of data, what the data mean is the key question.  The consensus of government bodies worldwide, based on…

A few weeks ago, I came across a press release issued by the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), a European-based  non-governmental (NGO) organization dedicated to environmental health activism, in which they trumpeted the release of a new U.S. government funded study claiming that environmental chemical exposures were annually costing society more than 10% of global gross domestic product.   HEAL and other like-minded NGOs are using these results in an effort to grab the attention of policy makers who, based on the best available evidence, view chemical exposure as…

In the haze of smoke and mirrors about nutrition, it's easy to think that you will lose weight if you eliminate some scary chemicals (Endocrine Disruptors!™) or scary foods (Sugar! Dairy! Meat! High Fructose Corn Syrup! Grain! Gluten!) but the reality is much simpler: You just need fewer calories. No, really. In 100 percent of studies, people who consumed fewer calories than they burned lost weight. Harvard Food Frequency Questionnaires, with their numerous outcomes and numerous foods, are guaranteed to come up with a food that will cause disease with a .05 p-value. That is how…