There are reasons to get an HPV vaccine - it literally prevents cancer - but consumer marketing is misstating absolute and relative risk when it comes to throat cancer. A preventive vaccine against HPV types, 6, 11, 16, and 18 has been in widespread use for a decade, and a version that also protects against five other HPV types was FDA-approved in 2014. Those vaccines won't clear existing HPV infections.

If you read a headline declaring that scientists had discovered that up to 75 percent of human food samples were found to be contaminated with some scary-sounding substance, like arsenic, what would you think? (1)

You'd be worried, and rightfully so. But if you then found many paragraphs into the story the scientists admitting that the scary substance is in such minuscule trace amounts that it can't possibly pose a risk to human health, how would your feelings change? In an era of "fake news", you'd feel like that's just what you got.

Fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer mainly found among children and young people, currently has surgery as the only treatment available. But even then less than 40 percent of patients will survive beyond five years.

It might help to discover what causes it.

Expectant moms get a lot of advice from the Internet, friends, and even strangers. It's a lot of judgment, given that this miracle of birth has already happened 13 billion times without anyone telling mothers to eat purple vegetables or their child won't get into Stanford.

The digital age, where publication is cheap, coupled with epidemiology which can show almost anything, has led to a lot of confusion. But when the word "stillbirth" is invoked, as was recently down in The Journal of Physiology, pregnant women will panic. 

Yet they shouldn't. No babies were harmed in a study which nonetheless claims babies could be harmed if moms sleep on their backs. 

When corporate media revealed during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign that Donald Trump had expressed anti-vaccine sentiments, Democrats in "blue states breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, journalists could claim anti-vaccine sentiment was bipartisan.

Alternative medicine frauds like Dr. Allan Spreen of the ironically named Institute of Health Sciences (they claim their supplement can cure cancer in 6 weeks) may be rejoicing about a new study showing Vitamin D can protect against asthma attacks but the attacks were only reduced when people took standard asthma medication. 

Asthma affects more than 300 million people worldwide and is estimated to shorten lifespan for up to 400,000 people annually. Asthma deaths are primarily due to viral upper respiratory infections which cause asthma attacks.