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Going...going...Obama's "Clean Power Plan" Unlikely to See the Light of Day

In an unprecedented decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has sort-of overruled a lower Circuit Court's...

Rogue EPA Wants to Run Our Country

I couldn't help but laugh — one has to, or cry: the headline read, "EPA looks to build on 2015...

NYTimes Exposé Aims At Toxic Chemical, Hits OCD Lawyer Instead

The New York Times continues its grand tradition of always letting its ideology trump sound science...

America's Great Leap Forward: Watermelon Environmentalism

Pre-test Q: What in blue blazes does he mean by that? (Answer at the end)**A commenter pointed...

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Gil RossRSS Feed of this column.

MD from NYU School of Medicine 1972. Medical training (Internal medicine) at NYU-Bellevue and Jacobi-Bronx Municipal NYC, rheumatology and IM boards (75 and 78) after Montefiore fellowship. Private... Read More »

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Well, don't this beat all! An article in The Guardian announcing the 17 newly-honored Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees was entitled, "First EPA chief accuses Republicans of ignoring science for political gain."

Last week, the American Cancer Society changed its recommendations for normal-risk women regarding screening mammograms: they took a middle road between their prior advisories and those of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF): ACS no longer recommends routine mammograms for women age 40-44, and advised reducing frequency to every two years for women aged 55 and older.

Headlines around the world blared the news, bad news many had anticipated since 2011: Japan confirms that a worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant got cancer from his exposure to radiation.
Another "study" — junk is too kind a term for this laugher — attempts to impugn the revolutionary technology for oil and gas exploration: high-volume hydraulic fracturing, better known as "fracking." The wise men and women of the formerly respected Johns Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health published their propaganda piece in the journal Epidemiology with the neutral-sounding title, "Unconventional Natural Gas Development and Birth Outcome in Pennsylvania, USA." 
While smoking rates are rising in the Third World, and declining in America, one statistic seems immutable: EU residents have the highest smoking rates and mortality rates in the civilized world. Their solution: ban Swedish snus, the smokeless product which has kept Sweden's smoking rate the lowest in Europe; pass a revised Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), whose Article 20 would place major barriers for smokers seeking to quit by using reduced-harm methods such as e-cigarettes and vapor products; and do absolutely nothing effective against the real problem, lethal addictive cigarettes.  

Almost as soon as the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed in 1976, the environmental movement began to complain about its shortcomings.