My book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (Oxford University Press, 2008 ) will be officially released May 1st (though it’s available now through Amazon and Powell’s), and I’ll be writing and speaking more about it over the next several weeks. The book reports on the way scientists working […]

I wrote last week about how the FDA’s mixup with Chinese factory names kept it from inspecting the Chinese facility producing the main ingredient for Baxter’s heparin; this problem came to light after the drug was implicated in four deaths. (To date, more than 400 adverse reactions have been reported.) Today, articles in the New […]

Today’s front page story in USA Today is about a shortage of surgeons at U.S. hospitals, with a focus on rural areas; the shortage threatens the health of 54 million rural Americans, reports Robert Davis. Part of the problem is that medical schools held enrollment steady for too long, rather than increasing it to account for the […]

Most of us are lucky enough not to have to worry about our sewage. We flush the toilet, it goes away somewhere, and we don’t have to worry about cholera or other diseases that spread when waste contaminates the water supply. While most of sewage systems do a great job of making the water look […]

In the LA Times, Victoria Kim follows up on the issue of USDA inspections related to the record-setting beef recall. The terrible practices caught on tape at the Hallmark slaughterhouse evidently occurred under the nose of USDA inspectors, and Kim’s article explains how this can happen:

Baxter International announced recently that it has temporarily halted production of heparin, a generic anti-clotting drug, because of four fatalities and hundreds of bad reactions potentially tied to the drug. Baxter and the FDA say they don’t know the exact cause of the bad reactions, but attention has focused on the active ingredient supplied by […]

The date is set for the presidential candidates’ Science Debate 2008 – it’ll be April 18th at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute – so now the push is to get candidates’ commitment to participate. Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama have been invited, and the fact that the debate is set for four days […]

The push for a presidential candidate science debate is stronger than ever: Yesterday, the National Academies joined other prestigious organizations to co-sponsor the effort. “This would provide a nonpartisan setting to educate voters on the candidates’ positions on key science, technology, and health challenges facing the next administration, while giving the candidates an opportunity to […]

Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a coal industry “astroturf” organization, is sponsoring the Republican presidential debate tonight and Democratic debate tomorrow night, both in California and hosted by CNN. Think Progress has noticed that ABEC has sponsored three previous debates on CNN, and, in each one, there have been no questions about global warming. […]

Catch Devra Davis on BookTV this weekend, talking about her terrific book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. More details, including broadcast times, are here.