When I was researching a piece last year on chemical regulation — and the lack of it in the U.S. — one of the facts I was most surprised to learn was the existence of perchlorate in the bloodstream of many Americans.
Well, it only took three votes in the House of Representatives and two votes in the Senate, plus a little back and forth over basic constitutionality, but the landmark Food Safety and Modernization Act is now poised to become …
Pregnant women and children have long been warned that they should be wary of eating certain kinds of seafood because of the risk of mercury contamination.
Over on Ecocentric (home for all your green and green-related needs), I have a post on a neat new study in Nature that makes the case that dwindling animal and plant biodiversity can actually increase the risk of infectious …
I was lucky — or unlucky — enough to have a front-row seat for one of the most surprising and frightening infectious disease outbreaks in recent history.
Hong Kong residents experienced an unwelcome blast from the past on Nov. 18. A 59-year-old woman in the city contracted H5N1 avian influenza — the first confirmed case in Hong Kong since 2003.
Here’s a fact to brighten your Thursday: you have a much smaller chance than your grandparents of bursting into flames.
Yesterday Canada—with very little fanfare—declared the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) a toxic substance, both to the environment and to public health.
Dr. Devra Davis’s new book Disconnect — the result of an investigation into the data on cell phones and cancer, as well as the wireless industry’s efforts to stave off regulation — is convincing enough to give you pause …
In this week’s Science, researchers led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona and Preston Marx of the Tulane National Primate Research Center looked at the history of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) — the primate …
So sayeth the World Health Organization (WHO)—and they should know, since they were the ones who declared a full, phase six-level pandemic a little more than a year ago. Now it’s done—this morning WHO head Dr. Margaret Chan announced that the group’s emergency committee of top flu experts had convinced her that the pandemic had …
Over at the Ecocentric blog, I wrote about a new policy direction from the Food and Drug Administration on the use of antibiotics in meat production. Antibiotics—often used for growth promotion and given in the feed of animals—are a major part of America’s meat production. The Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the …
A cross-post from Time.com’s Ecocentric blog:
A new study published Saturday in the British medical journal the Lancet found that tens of millions of people in Bangladesh have been exposed to poisonous levels of arsenic from …