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As a scary E. coli outbreak spreads across Europe, health authorities in the EU are coming to grips with the fact that the transnational body may not be ready to investigate and stop a major foodborne illness. But surely we’d do better if a similar outbreak occurred in the U.S. Right? Maybe not. We’re lucky [...]
Chances are your hamburger is on drugs. Not the illegal kind—probably—but the medicinal sort. Though the statistics are fuzzy, environmentalists and sustainable food advocates believes vast amounts of antibiotics are delivered at low levels to farm animals, to promote rapid growth and produce meat more cheaply. According to a recent study (PDF) by the Food [...]
Crossposted from TIME’s Healthland Bad news for women who like to get their hair severely straightened with the popular Brazilian blowout technique à la Jennifer Aniston: it may look good, but apparently it’s not good for you.
Cross posted from TIME’s Healthland Plastics. They seem so…inert. Slow to erode or decay, with a biodegradation time measured in the hundreds of years, plastics appear cut off from the organic environment in the way that no other product is, safe and secure and sterile. Yet scientists have begun to learn that plastics are anything [...]
The troubled but important food safety bill finally passed Congress yesterday, and should be signed by President Obama today. I have a post over at Healthland explaining why the bill may not be worth much without more funding.
Over at the Healthland blog, I have a post up on a new report from the venerable Consumer Reports on potentially unsafe levels of mercury found in canned tuna. Mercury contamination is a real risk for pregnant women and young children—the Consumer Reports investigation shows that mercury may be more prevalent in canned tuna than we [...]
It’s used almost everywhere. It’s in almost all of us. It does weird things to rodents and it may be doing weird things to us—but it’s tough to be certain. Bisphenol-A (BPA) has become a litmus test for how people view environmental health and the risks of common household chemicals—as I wrote in a long [...]
I had the chance to go on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC yesterday afternoon to talk about the renewed push to regulate antibiotics used for growth promotion in farm animals. With the Food and Drug Administration now urging meat producers to limit the amount of drugs they give their animals—over concern about the rise [...]
Let’s put this out there first: I do not know much about cosmetics. I have deodorant and shaving cream and—because I burn in the sun faster than Robert Pattinson in Twilight—lots and lots of sunblock. The average American uses 10 personal care products a day, and I am sub-average. But I do know that government [...]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—gingerly, gingerly—took a step on Monday towards addressing one of the most fundamental but unknown threats to public health: the overuse of antibiotics in animal food and water. The FDA said in a new policy document that the uses of antibiotics for agriculture should be limited to treated sick animals, [...]
