The evidence is in. The scientific community has reached a clear consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism. There is no controversy.” So begins an in-depth discussion of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense penned by “SkepDoc” Harriet Hall in a recent issue of eSkeptic. It is a must read for any thinking person who has been baffled by the likes of Jenny McCarthy and her unconscionable sponsors, boyfriend Jim Carrey (who bankrolls McCarthy’s dangerous ignorance) and Oprah Winfrey (who provides McCarthy with television time so that she can endanger the lives of even more children).

With the increasing popularity of whitening teeth, and some studies showing negative effects of teeth whitening, researchers at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health at the University of Rochester Medical Center set out to learn if there are negative effects on the tooth from using whitening products.

Eastman Institute's YanFang Ren, DDS, PhD, and his team determined that the effects of 6 percent hydrogen peroxide, the common ingredient in professional and over-the-counter whitening products, are insignificant compared to acidic fruit juices. Orange juice markedly decreased hardness and increased roughness of tooth enamel.

Both as a responsible parent and a blogger looking for interesting crap to write about, I subscribe to an FDA electronic mailing list that lets me know when the FDA issues a warning about a product or chastises a naughty company.  On Tuesday I received notification that the FDA has published a document on the safe use of lasers: Illuminating the Hazards of Powerful Laser Products.  Apparently, the FDA has regulatory authority over lasers in the US:

FDA regulates radiation-emitting electronic products, including all types of lasers.

The man who stopped smoking

is the title of a video from the British Medical Journal (BMJ).  The blurb says:

Richard Doll was a luminary of clinical research whose case control study, published in the BMJ in 1950, first identified smoking as an important cause of cancer and other diseases. The paper's findings were received with apathy, anger and disbelief. This 10 minute film to promote the BMJ archive now being fully searchable back to 1840 charts Doll's remarkable life and the impact of both of this paper, and his follow-up British Doctors' Study.

Research links smog to devastating effects not just on lungs but on hearts, brains and fetal development.

By Greg Critser
June 23, 2009

Not long ago, Jesus Araujo, a cardiology researcher at UCLA, parked a cage full of transgenic mice alongside the 110 Freeway. As a control, he placed another group in a less-polluted space on the Westside. Araujo was interested in learning more about how smog affects the heart and whether bad air could help explain the persistence of heart disease after 25 years of cholesterol management, statins and endless lifestyle advice.

Now there's a new reason for the weight-conscious to drink fat free milk at breakfast time, suggests a new study published in the July issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers in Australia found that drinking fat free milk in the morning helped increase satiety, or a feeling of fullness, and led to decreased calorie intake at the next meal, as compared with a fruit drink. The milk drinkers ate about 50 fewer calories (or nearly 9% less food) at lunch.

The ethical issues of rape meet the perils of scientific ignorance in Zimbabwe, as detailed in this article from CNN highlighting the work of Betty Makoni:

Like many young girls in Zimbabwe, Hope was the victim of a widely held
belief that if a man with HIV or AIDS rapes a virgin he will be cured
of his disease. This so-called virgin myth, perpetuated by Zimbabwe's
traditional healers, has led to the rape of hundreds of girls,
according to UNICEF. Some of those victims are too young to walk, much
less protect themselves.

Living in an area with more fast food outlets and convenience stores than supermarkets and grocers has been associated with obesity in a Canadian study published by BMC Public Health.

Correlation/causation misfire?   Sure, unless you want to believe that the government should put up a fresh food stand within a half mile of your house to keep you from becoming obese. 

Not only is Oprah getting called out by megalomaniacal graduate students and low-rent news magazines, now Reader's Digest has piled on. 

Celebrities may be perfectly qualified to evaluate sneakers, but that doesn't mean you want to learn biochemistry from them.
-Reader's Digest

The Onion has given the anti-vaccine movement their patented treatment.
*Hat tip to THE Skepchick Rebecca Watson.

University of Louisville neurologist Robert P. Friedland, M.D., questions the safety of eating farmed fish in the June issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  A legitimate worry about the nation's food supply or a case of an anti-farmed fish agenda? 

Friedland and co-authors suggest, despite any evidence or anything outside their own speculation, that farmed fish byproducts rendered from cows, like bone meal, could transmit Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, commonly known as mad cow disease, to humans.   Despite the lack of evidence, they are urging government regulators to ban feeding cow meat or bone meal to fish until the safety of this common practice can be confirmed.   How can you further prove something is safe that has been in use for decades without issue?

Newborn babies have immature immune systems, making them highly vulnerable to severe infections and unable to mount an effective immune response to most vaccines, thereby frustrating efforts to protect them. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 2 million newborns and infants less than 6 months of age die each year due to infection. Now, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston believe they have found a way to enhance the immune system at birth and boost newborns' vaccine responses, making infections like respiratory syncytial virus, pneumococcus and rotavirus much less of a threat.

And I did it again after OB/GYN, woonackerist, beloved of Oprah, and shoe-in for The Festival of Idiots (just guess what number) Dr. Christiane Northrup is telling us its your low heart.  Well, I always sucked at pronunciation.

Yeah, I know, you just threw up a little in your mouth. It happens.  Actually, I did not come here to discuss Oprah's vagina.  I came here to discuss her use of the word vagina, or, more precisely, her lack of use of the word vagina.

Oprah, instead, uses the word "VaJayJay". 

While nothing says we take women's health issues seriously like making cutesy nicknames out of anatomical descriptions, we all know vaginas are dirty and bad**, right? 

They even used "VaJayJay" and "low heart" when discussing the vagina with an OB/GYN. 
Admittedly, the ability to take said OB/GYN seriously was greatly

I regularly read the Huffington Post, for the good reason that it often sports intelligent articles written from a progressive standpoint, and because I believe in open access and open contribution to the socio-political discourse (otherwise, I wouldn’t bother writing this blog).

Then again, one of the drawbacks of openness is that you get crap together with the good stuff.

This isn’t altogether bad, since reading crap is a necessary component of developing one’s own sense of critical thinking, sharpening the baloney detector, so to speak. But crap needs to be responded to, especially when it comes from influential sources.

Do you think high fructose corn syrup makes you fatter than sugar?   You're not alone.   In the culture wars, they like lines blurry and corporations who got rid of corn syrup have been using that as a marketing claim.    

Three top researchers say they have corrected inaccuracies and misunderstandings concerning high fructose corn syrup's impact on the American diet and examined how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers this sweetener in light of the upcoming 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans in their session, 'High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sorting Myth from Reality', at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.

Sometimes vaccines can eradicate widespread disease, like MMR, diphtheria, polio, smallpox. Sometimes they can mired in controversy, like the fight over whether they cause autism. In this case, it's the former.

A study published in the Lancet suggests that the number of children under 15 years of age with type 1 diabetes will rise to 160,000 in Europe by 2020, a relative increase of 70 percent from 2005.