North Korea announced a scientific breakthrough on Friday, and it had nothing to do with the missile tests that startled the world this week. Researchers developed a new cosmetic agent to make skin supple, state-run media boasted.
"They analyzed in a scientific way why the hand skin of those who are making bean paste is smooth and fair," state news agency KCNA reported.
Armed with the data, scientists made an agent that helps fight wrinkles and lightens moles and fr... (more)
Earlier this year, the dairy industry was once again caught hyping a distorted study to claim that milk prevents diabetes. Based on research conducted by the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, milk proponents claimed that if you drank enough milk, you would reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes. Leave it to the dairy industry to come up with a whopper like this. They'd like you to believe milk will do anything -- it will increase your bone mass, make ... (more)
Healthy adults who took the maximum dose of Tylenol for two weeks were found to have liver damage, according to a study appearing in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers instructed 106 study participants to take 4 grams of Tylenol (eight extra-strength tablets) a day for two weeks, with some taking only Tylenol, and some taking Tylenol combined with an opioid painkiller. The rest of the participants were given a placebo.
Fears about eating beef from cattle pumped up with growth hormones have been raised by a government expert.
John Verrall said there is alarming evidence it can trigger breast and other cancers, bring forward puberty in girls and increase the risk of genital abnormalities in boys.
Mr Verrall, a member of a Government advisory committee, is so concerned that he has defied an official attempt to gag him.
He points to a rise in rates of breast and prostat... (more)
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the physician who published a paper in 1998 showing a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, is being charged with professional misconduct by the UK's General Medical Council.
The Council's preliminary charges include:
* Publishing "inadequately founded" research
* Failing to obtain ethical committee approval
* Obtaining funding "improperly"
* Subjecting children to "unnecessar... (more)
CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 30, 2006--From soda to chewing gum, sugar-free foods and beverages are filling supermarket shelves as Americans embrace artificial sweeteners. By 2005, sales of sugar-free foods and beverages reached a sweet total of $5.9 billion. Despite sales growth, concern over potential health risks of artificial sweeteners is high. According to a recent report by Mintel, more than 60 percent of American adults are concerned about the safety of artificial sweeteners. ... (more)
A group of researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton have filed a patent for a low-intensity pulsed ultrasound tool that can re-grow teeth and bones.
The device is smaller than a pea, and massages gums and stimulates tooth growth from the jaw when placed in the mouth. According to Jie Chen, an engineering professor and nanocircuit design expert who helped design the device, it can also stimulate jawbone growth to fix a crooked smile, and may eventually be able to stimul... (more)
The unending game of “pretend” that the U.S. media allow George Bush to play on the global stage, so often letting his lying utterances hang suspended, unchallenged, in the middle of the story, as though they were plausible — as though a class of third-graders couldn’t demolish them with a few innocent questions — feels like the journalistic equivalent of waterboarding. Gasp! Some truth, please!
I suggest the prez has forfeited the right to command a headline, or half a story, or ... (more)
Three international food companies have taken steps to remove lead from candy sold in the United States and Mexico as part of a settlement announced by prosecutors Thursday. The firms also agreed to pay nearly $1 million to help the industry address the issue.
Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, who joined state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer in the litigation leading to the settlement, said it already had resulted in the reduction of lead in "Mexican-style" candy found in Los Angel... (more)
Though the Sanofi-Aventis antibiotic Ketek has been shown to damage the liver and sometimes cause death after a few doses, the FDA says the drug's benefits outweigh its risks and has allowed the product to remain on the market.
Ketek is often prescribed to children. It has been approved to treat sinusitis, bronchitis and mild-to-moderate pneumonia. According to the New York Times, an FDA safety reviewer argued in May that Sanofi-Aventis should stop testing Ketek on children with e... (more)
Chicago health inspectors shut down one of Chicago's biggest candy factories for code violations. Candies made at the factory included Snickers and M&M's. Inspectors say they found mouse droppings and fruit flies at the factory.
The M&M-Mars candy company is on the city's West Side on Oak Park Avenue near Armitage.
From the front it looks like a university campus. The lawns and shrubs are immaculately groomed. In fact, there isn't even a sign indicating what they ma... (more)
June 30, 2006 is a day that will be long remembered as a dark milestone in the history of FDA and its campaign against health consumers. On June 30, an FDA "Final Rule" goes into effect, establishing a regulatory power grab of such scale and scope that it attempts to bypass all laws, the will of Congress and fundamental protections for consumers. This "Final Rule," which may as well be called a "Final Solution" for drug consumers, claims that consumers can no longer sue drug companies for the ha... (more)
New research links infection with cancer Study raises hopes antibiotics may be an alternative to chemo, radiation The Associated Press Updated: 12:41 a.m. AKT Oct 31, 2005 PARIS - New research suggests that infection with bacteria from the Chlamydia family may play a role in the development of a type of lymphoma that affects the tissue around the eye, raising hopes that antibiotics may one day prove to be an alternative to chemotherapy or radiation.
TORONTO (CP) - A dangerous strain of a superbug that can be caught outside hospital settings has moved beyond the boundaries of the high-risk groups it first plagued in Canada, causing illness in healthy adults and children in a number of provinces across the country, researchers reported Tuesday.
In a series of articles and commentaries rushed to print by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, they reported on the spread of community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococc... (more)
(NewsTarget) A report released by Consumers International (CI) -- the world federation of consumer organizations -- accuses 20 of the largest drug companies across Europe and the UK of endangering public health by engaging in illegal marketing practices.
According to the CI report, drug companies are covertly bribing doctors, suppressing or altering the results of drug-safety studies, and convincing consumers that they are ill through multi-billion-dollar marketing campaigns. CI s... (more)
(NewsTarget) An International Agency for Research on Cancer study showed that chest X-rays may increase women's chances of developing breast cancer. The study involved 1,600 women with high-risk BRCA1 and 2 gene mutations.
"If confirmed in prospective studies, young women who are members of families known to have BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations may wish to consider alternatives to X-ray, such as MRI," Lead researcher Dr. David Goldgar said.
A mystery illness that seemed plucked from the pages of a science fiction novel.
The symptoms included strange white or red "fibers" sprouting from skin lesions, sores that would not heal and "white granules and black specks" appearin... (more)
OAKLAND -- A horrifying and fascinating disease is affecting thousands of people in the Bay Area, along the Gulf Coast and in Florida. Though some doctors have claimed the malady is psychosomatic, other scientists are making headway unraveling the mystery of Morgellons Disease.
Former Oakland A's pitcher Billy Koch has it. And so do his wife and their three children. And though they can afford top medical care, doctors have no answers.
Before the 1980s, with the exception of Disney and McDonald's masterminds Walt Disney and Ray Kroc, companies felt little incentive to market their products to children because they felt children had no buying power. This perspective made sense at the time: Children have little or no income and limited ability to buy items on their own -- unless they use "pester power" to get the materialistic goods they want.
Though Kroc and Disney began marketing their products specifically to c... (more)
Let's get to the raw truth about the pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies want to turn every normal human experience into a diagnosable disease that's treatable with their high-priced, patent-protected, brand-name drugs. It used to be that drugs were intended just to treat bonafide diseases -- things like malaria or infections -- but now the drug companies have realized that it's a much more profitable venture to invent diseases, and then sell drugs to treat them.
A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.
Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called Avastin into the eyes of patients with wet macular degeneration, a common condition of older age that can lead to severely impaired eyesight and blindness. They report ... (more)
Is mainstream medical science ignoring an inexpensive, painless, readily available cure for cancer?
Mark Levine mulls this loaded question.
The government nutrition researcher has published new evidence that suggests vitamin C can work like chemotherapy - only better. But so far, he hasn't been able to interest cancer experts in conducting the kind of conclusive studies that, one way or the other, would advance treatment.
Or, put more exactly, now it turns out that a chemical that's released when you heat up Teflon is in everyone's blood stream -- and probably causes cancer and birth defects.
I loved Teflon.
I loved the no-carb ricotta pancake I invented last year, which can be cooked only on Teflon. I loved my Teflon-coated frying pan, which makes a... (more)
BRISTOL - During a campaign stop in Bristol, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman said he may try to amend a defense spending bill next week to add money for a study about the impact of depleted uranium munitions on the health of veterans.
"We need an independent study," the Connecticut Democrat said Friday.
Advocates for veterans have been saying for years they are concerned that the weakly radioactive, dense metal used in modern-day munitions may have exposed hundreds of th... (more)
I was describing the raw foods diet to someone the other day, and they remarked, "Well I'm not sure I want to do that. I don't want to do something so extreme," and I said, "What do you mean extreme? You think the raw foods diet is extreme?" Then it hit me: Most people think that the processed food diet -- loaded with chemicals, additives, preservatives, artificial plastic fats and milled grains that are depleted of nutrients -- is normal.
In this article, we're going to explore w... (more)
During the last 20 years the total number of people with diabetes worldwide has risen from 30 million to 230 million, according to the International Diabetes Federation. China and India now have the most diabetes sufferers in the world.
Today, out of the top ten countries with diabetes sufferers, seven are developing countries. The Caribbean and the Middle East have regions where the percentage of adults with diabetes has reached 20%. In certain parts of Africa developing diabetes... (more)
