Mark Shapiro, an investigative journalist, makes the case on the Huffington Post about the need to ban phthalates in children's toys. Responding to the charge that he had abandoned journalism for activism, he argues: "My work was reporting the findings of scientists about the apparent havoc wreaked on infant's...

Sex, Drugs, Race and the Chemicapocalypse

Each year, STATS publishes its "Dubious Data" Awards, in the grand manner of looking back over the year and sighing at the fact that nothing was learned from the one previous. This was particularly the case with the coming of the chemicapocalypse -...

Wow -you have to love Bacon-gate as a media scandal! It has everything: frothing editors, who if not quite superannuated, are definitely long-in-the-tooth, supercilious media critics, vitriolic journalism professors, ageism, elitism, Islamophobia and whether it will derail the first black presidency of the United States.

So let's recap, Perry...

If there were an award for the goofiest-named activist group, "People For Clean Beds" would be a contender. Who isn't for clean beds - or clean dishes, or clean underwear? People for Clean Underwear - who wouldn't join?

But the dirty linen in this case is not so...

It is the most important barometer of cancer research - a survey of over 7000 recent studies on cancer that took five years to complete - but one of the World Cancer Research Fund's key recommendations on how to avoid cancer may be flawed because of what was not included...

The contention that the Bush administration has made a brute mockery of science has become such a truism that Hillary Clinton has gone so far as to make "the war on science" a campaign issue, recently decrying the politicization of science as "dangerous for our democracy." After...

Don't eat plastic - or electronic consumer items. That's the real message behind Greenpeace's latest study on the supposed safety of the iPhone if you look at the evidence logically.

There are chemicals in the plastic used to make the phone, phthalates in the vinyl coverings of the ear...

Recently, I had the pleasure to interview Louis Auchincloss, one of the great American novelists, and undoubtedly the greatest American novelist of power, money and politics. He was almost constitutionally incapable of talking about the war in Iraq but he did draw some interesting parallels with Vietnam, and specifically, the...

There is good environmentalism and there is bad environmentalism: The first is driven by science and achieves meaningful results that improve public health and the state of the planet; the second is driven by fear and creates the illusion of action.

Perhaps the great Chinese lead paint toy scandal...

If you have been following the trials and tribulations of the diabetes drug Avandia, you might be surprised to have learned that after all the grim prognostication in the media, all the haughty criticism of the state of drug regulation by newspaper op-eds, the warnings of death-tolls exceeding 9/11, and...

Sometimes it takes considerable statistical expertise to diagnose the errors journalists make in health reporting; sometimes it just means reading the study they claim to be reporting on and particularly the conclusion, where the authors talk about the "limitations" of their findings; and sometimes it just requires a basic knowledge...

The endless worrying over whether Murdamort will kill the Wall Street Journal misses the salient point that will really determine the future of the paper: the Journal *is* being killed on Wall Street by the Financial Times. Given that many in the American media seem comfortable with making categorical pronouncements...

I'm not sure I understand why Fiona Ma, a qualified tax accountant with a fondness for Brit Goth music, is so afraid. As a California State Assemblywoman, she has been pushing and pushing to have phthalates banned from children's toys, when the evidence for danger has...

As another major scientific journal criticizes the methodology behind a study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that prompted a nationwide panic over a popular diabetes drug, it turns out that the doctor who authored the study, Steven Nissen MD, delivered a blistering attack on those very methods...

In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has more often than not been damned for regulating too little rather than too much; but in a horrible twist, reported by Thomas M. Burton and Shelly Banjo in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, the very scientific principles which stand between the...

Two recent news items capture our national state of regulatory schizophrenia: In Tennessee, World War Two veterans must now provide identification before they can buy a beer in a store - thanks to a new law that came into effect on July 1 making universal carding mandatory. Meanwhile, in...

I have just managed to read a copy of Brian Strom's written, public submission to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which wasn't completed in time for the oversight hearings on the diabetes drug Avandia on June 6, and so didn't appear in any of the media accounts...

Some Huffington Post readers may be perplexed as to why, in the recent controversy over the diabetes drug Avandia, I have twice taken a position that appears antithetical to Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform seeking accountability from the Food and Drug Administration and the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline...

Among the many febrile statements that followed the publication of a study in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) contending that a diabetes pill carried an unacceptable risk of heart attack, one comment stood out, not so much for the scale of prognostication (deaths from Avandia may "dwarf 9/11,"...

The Museum of Television and Radio is no more, and with it dies the winsome idea of studious curators parsing the drama of long-forgotten sitcoms or compiling strange indexes to imaginary events and people. Not that that's what actually went on there among the thousands of hours of...