On the far east side of Michigan, the future of fluoride in drinking water — long an ordinary practice for preventing tooth decay — has suddenly provoked passionate debate. Public meetings in St. Clair County, about an hour northeast of Detroit, have filled with people weighing in. One man waved his Fixodent denture cream before the county commissioners, suggesting that his own experience showed...
Cigarettes kill nearly half a million Americans each year. Everyone knows it, including the Food and Drug Administration. Yet while the most lethal nicotine product remains on sale in every gas station, the FDA continues to block or delay far safer alternatives. Nicotine pouches—small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip—deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon...
Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Doctors and scientists are waging a shadow war in the besieged nation: bacteria that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. The deadly bugs are now knocking on western Europe’s door. As Hailie Uren rushed to meet the injured British soldier evacuated to her hospital in western Ukraine, the Australian clinician reflected on how...
Getting enough sleep is one of the most accessible and powerful ways to maintain healthy skin. TatyanaGl/iStock via Getty Images ~~~~~ Have you ever woken up after a night of poor sleep, glanced in the mirror and thought, “I look tired?” You’re not imagining it. I am a neurologist who specializes in sleep medicine. And though “beauty sleep” may sound like a fairy tale, a growing body of research...
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on a generic drugmaker that was the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year, citing problems with safety tests that delayed the recall of a medicine linked to deaths in the U.S. In December,...
Commentary So the next level of ruining the human being has begun. According to a recent article in the BBC, some person at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology was given £10 million by the Wellcome Trust to start making new designer DNA. Because our DNA is such a crapshoot. What does God know anyway? If you didn’t know, the Wellcome Trust “frequently collaborates with the Bill & Melinda...
