Health Glance
Major tobacco companies that spent decades denying they lied to the U.S. public about the dangers of cigarettes must spend their own money on a public advertising campaign saying they did lie, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
The ruling sets out what might be the harshest sanction to come out of a historic case that the Justice Department brought in 1999 accusing the tobacco companies of racketeering. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote that the new advertising campaign would be an appropriate counterweight to the companies' "past deception" dating to at least 1964.
The advertisements are to be published in various media for as long as two years.
Judge orders tobacco companies to admit deception
As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias
For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup. The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best.
“We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies,” a senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline, Lawson Macartney, said in a news release.
The Healing Power of Marijuana Has Barely Been Tapped
There are now legal medical cannabis programs in 18 states plus Washington, DC, with pot fully legal for adults in two other states. Ironically, however, the actual healing power of the plant has barely been tapped. Smoking marijuana with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), or better, vaporizing it (using a device to bake the plant material and inhale the active ingredients), has an indisputably palliative effect and can be medically useful for pain relief, calming and appetite stimulation.
It already has confirmed benefits against glaucoma, epilepsy and other specific diseases and disorders. It also gets people high. THC triggers cannabinoid receptors in the brain and this produces the sensation of being stoned. These receptors are found in the parts of the brain linked to pleasure, memory, concentration, and time perception.
Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret
We're here to ask him about something he doesn't like to talk about: a job he did 30 years ago, when he owned a trucking company. He got a contract with a local industrial plant called Asian Rare Earth, co-owned by Mitsubishi Chemical, that supplied special minerals to the personal electronics industry.
Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load—the quicker the trip, the more money they earned.
Workplace chemicals up breast cancer risk
U.S., Canadian, British and Scottish researchers said there was a link between breast cancer in women who work in jobs exposed to a "toxic soup" of chemicals.
The study involved 1,005 women with breast cancer and 1,147 without the disease and found women who worked in jobs classified as highly exposed to chemicals for 10 years had a 42 percent increased risk of breast cancer.
Study leader Dr. James Brophy and Dr. Margaret Keith, both at the Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group at the University of Stirling in Scotland and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, said women who worked in farming had a 36 percent increased breast cancer risk. Several pesticides act as mammary carcinogens and many are endocrine disrupting chemicals, the researchers said.
Mammograms barely lower death rate, lead to many wrong diagnoses, study finds
The growing use of routine mammograms over the past 30 years has done little to lower the death rate from breast cancer but has sharply increased the number of women who are wrongly diagnosed with the disease, a new study reported.
The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is sure to intensify the already fierce debate over how often women should get mammograms, a controversy that has embroiled policymakers, politicians and physicians — not to mention their female patients.
Greenpeace warns of chemicals in global fashion
Two-thirds of high-street garments tested in a study by Greenpeace contained potentially harmful chemicals, the group said Tuesday, highlighting the findings with a "toxic" fashion show in Beijing.
The environmental campaign group is pushing for fashion brands to commit to "zero discharge of all hazardous chemicals" by 2020 and to require suppliers to publicise any toxic chemicals they release into the environment.
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