Health Glance
var articleheadline = "Tobacco firms kept quiet on polonium role in cigarettes ";Some of the world's biggest tobacco firms researched the lethal radioactive substance polonium – present in cigarettes – over a 40-year period but never published the results, according to a new scientific article.
Polonium 210 is known to cause lung cancers in animals and studies suggest it is responsible for 1 per cent of all lung cancers – equivalent to 11,700 deaths globally – each year in the US. It is also the substance that poisoned the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Yet tobacco companies, while attempting but failing to remove the substance from their products, have kept quiet about their research, experts say.
Drug companies are spending millions of pounds every year on all-expenses-paid trips to conferences around the world for doctors and other hospital staff, in what critics say is a massive marketing exercise dressed up as medical education.
Two new studies showing that vaccines increase the risk of diabetes have been published in the Open Pediatric Medicine Journal.
The Bush administration has proposed stronger protections for health-care workers who refuse to participate in abortions, issuing a sweeping regulation that could also undercut access to birth-control pills and other forms of contraception.
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may increase women's risk of developing breast cancer and interfere with cancer diagnostic techniques after as little as one year, according to a new large-scale study conducted by researchers from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
A 1999 clinical study that Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N) said was done to test side effects of its now-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx was done primarily to support a marketing campaign before its launch, according to researchers.
It seems as though hemp is not only an answer to our global health problems, both for people who don't have enough to eat and for people in the western world who are malnourished from eating the wrong foods, but also an answer to our environmental crisis.
