Other B vitamins have generated some legislation in the North Carolina General Assembly. They began considering a bill last week that would create a statewide vitamin distribution program in an effort to prevent or reduce birth defects. The bill would appropriate $480,000 for each of the next two years to purchase multivitamins with folic acid, […]
In other vitamin news, British researchers have found that vitamin D may help slow aging—in the study, women with higher vitamin D levels showed fewer aging-related changes in their DNA. Professor Brent Richards, who led the study, said, “This could help to explain how vitamin D has a protective effect on many aging-related diseases, such […]
On March 2, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on dietary supplements, calling for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to monitor supplements more closely and require increased adverse event reporting.
Last week, the US Supreme Court struck a blow to the pharmaceutical industry when they ruled that litigants may sue for damages if they are harmed by unsafe drugs—even if the drug manufacturers have satisfied federal regulators.
A fascinating article in the New York Times last week told the story of Matt Zerden, a student at Harvard Medical School who was troubled when he heard his pharmacology professor repeatedly promote the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.
A study published in the journal Cancer Research concluded that vitamin C given to mice or cultured cells treated with common anti-cancer drugs reduces the benefits of the chemotherapy.
The Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog group that exposes problems in government, has learned that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has quietly reduced their enforcement of federal quality regulations at laboratories that develop medical devices. The FDA’s inspections of “good laboratory practices” dropped dramatically in the past few years: from 33 in […]
The next time you have a case of diarrhea that lasts a day or more, chances are very good that you have food poisoning. Nearly 25% of Americans suffer a foodborne illness each year. Scientists have counted more than 250 food-related types of illness, which can range from viruses to bacteria to parasites.
The headlines were uniformly negative—“Vitamins Are Useless!” An “observational” study at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle looked at over 161,000 post-menopausal women, ages 50-79. Of the multivitamin supplements taken, none were counted if they were above tiny “recommended daily allowances,” and all reporting was done anecdotally. After eight years, researchers concluded there was […]
Columnist George Will first sounded the alarm on January 28. As he reported, the stimulus legislation now approved by Congress and signed into law by President Obama “create(s) a council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This is about medicine but not about healing the economy. The CER would identify (this is language from the draft report […]