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When Salt Is An Endocrine Disruptor, The Term Is Officially Meaningless

A new environmental claim about endocrine disruptors would seem to be an early Christmas gift for...

Rant: Enough Damn Awareness Days Already!

Dear Awareness People:Shut the F......... (1) I'm begging you.I already have more than enough to...

Old Man Balls: Fact Or Fiction?

Disclaimer: If you read this, don't blame me for whatever psychological damage that will inevitably...

European Endocrine Disruptor Study Is Lightweight Of Evidence

So, if you take literally what Patricia Hunt, Ph.D. and colleagues reported in the new...

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Josh Bloom, Ph.D. Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Ph.D. at the American Council on Science and Health, New York. He earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Virginia, and... Read More »

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Preventing heart disease with Vitamin BS

By David Seres, M.D. and Josh Bloom, Ph.D. 

It is not surprising when headlines—particularly those related to health issues—inaccurately convey the take home message from a given study. But, often it goes well beyond simple inaccuracy. 

By Josh Bloom and Henry Miller

The development of new drugs is among the riskiest of business ventures. It now takes 10-15 years for a pharmaceutical company to get a new drug approved, and on average the cost exceeds $2.5 billion. To establish its safety and effectiveness, a candidate drug or vaccine undergoes a lengthy process of laboratory, animal and clinical studies, and then regulatory review is conducted by the highly risk-averse FDA.

Fear, Inc. is having a very big day on the New York Stock Exchange. It is up 45 percent on heavy volume. How could it not be? After all, the plastic component BPS (bis-(4-hydroxyphenyl) sulfone) — supposedly a safe replacement for bisphenol A (BPA) — isn’t looking so great after all. 
In case you are fooled by the title, and are expecting to learn about a retro-metal group with a really terrible name, I apologize in advance. That's not what this is about.

At some point during the rancorous comment section that followed my last piece about Dr. Oz,  I promised I wouldn't be writing about him anymore. I lied. Unfortunately, these days there is little downside to doing this. At worst, it will make me slightly more likely to hold an elected office in New Jersey.
Just for yucks, let’s go back a few years and see how well people did in forecasting drug prices in the future.

Within the past decade, we began to hear the term “patent cliff”—the consequence of most blockbuster drugs losing patent protection during a short period of time. Perennial critics of the pharmaceutical industry were experiencing paroxysms of joy as the holy grail of health care savings—generic drug companies—became able to sell cheap copies of formerly multi-billion dollar products. 
Named after the location of first documented outbreak (Norwalk Ohio in 1968) norovirus, aka the "Stomach Flu," "Winter Vomiting Bug," or the "Cruise Ship Virus" is an evil little demon that spares no one. There are few, if any of us, who haven't experienced its misery; it infects 21 million people annually in the US every year—second only to the common cold. It is the leading cause (up to 80 percent) of gastroenteritis in the western world.