By Myron Levin
Fair Warning
What are the odds?
In 2009, Congress passed landmark legislation directing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, aiming to cut the toll from the leading preventable cause of disease and death. Three times since, however, cigarette and e-cigarette companies have filed successful legal challenges to thwart rules intended to make their products less appealing to consumers–and less accessible to kids. All were decided by the same federal judge.
By Dan Christensen
BrowardBulldog.org
UPDATE: FEB. 21 — With anxious residents watching at city hall and at home on computers and cable television, Oakland Park has put off for two weeks a decision on whether to approve a controversial psychiatric and drug rehabilitation hospital. The reason: Wednesday night’s hearing ran too late to finish the hearing.
By Lois Beckett
ProPublica
Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, treating about 2,000 patients a year for gunshots, stabbings and other violent injuries. So when researchers started screening patients there for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2011, they assumed they would find cases. They just didn’t know how many.
By Dan Christensen
BrowardBulldog.org
A new report sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse has determined that a heroin epidemic is underway in South Florida. “The key issue identified in 2013 is the outbreak of a heroin epidemic in South Florida and particularly in Miami-Dade County,” the report says.
By T. Christian Miller and Jeff Gerth
ProPublica
This story was produced in collaboration with Consumer Reports…
Starting in 2007, Dr. Daniel Budnitz, a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Medication Safety Program, began tracking an obscure but unsettling statistic about children’s health.
By Myron Levin
FairWarning
It’s hard to think of anything more reckless than adding a deadly carcinogen to a product that already causes cancer—and then bragging about the health benefits. That’s what Lorillard Tobacco did 60 years ago when it introduced Kent cigarettes, whose patented “Micronite” filter contained a particularly virulent form of asbestos.
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