Teva Pharmaceutical, which once responded to price-fixing allegations with ‘polite f-u’ letters’ now doesn't have the cash flow to pay off $4.2 billion of debt that matures in 2021.Refinancing maturities is not usually a big deal but Teva and Mylan and Heritage Pharmaceuticals became the poster children for Big Pharma arrogance - even though they are all genetic companies, and were somehow wrapped in an ethical halo compared to their original product predecessors. 

Baby Boomers, the generation that gave us rampant alcoholism, divorce, over-medicated American culture, and denial of science to protect the environment, are now being targeted by marketing groups with claims you don't need medicine, you can cure disease with...food.I'm not being mean to baby boomers, they also were the first generation to have a polio vaccine and they ended Smallpox. They paid the taxes that funded an optimistic War On Cancer and the successful moon landings and Medicare. I was just noting that if you are in the spin business, you can frame broad demographics, especially tens of millions of people, any way you want.And that is being done with a report saying baby boomers thinks food - specifically organic food -is medicine.

In America, FOIA documents show lots of emails with partisan journalists, allied academics, and organic industry trade groups colluding to promote each other's articles opposing science like pesticides and biotechnology.(1)

In today's politicization of science news, California, which just got scolded by EPA for trying to put cancer warning labels on a weedkiller (of all things) pivoted to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos.Last year, the scientifically wacky 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California - the most overturned appeals court by the Supreme Court of the United States - tried to order EPA to ban chlorpyrifos even though they hadn't seen any data showing it causes any defects in people. 

In 2009, broad new authority for FDA over tobacco products didn't include e-cigarettes because they were just a blip. Later, they took off in popularity. The free market is always mysterious but I liken it to Wi-fi and Bluetooth. While a centralized committee drawn from large companies came up with Bluetooth for the wireless future, then were years late in rolling out a product that didn't work very well, Wi-fi took off thanks to small players and public uptake in the free market.

If you don't trust Centers for Disease Control claims on vaping, opioids, or pre-diabetes, you are not wrong. In the last decade they became increasingly unreliable for anything where they don't just gather data from states, like vaccine rates and how many people vomit after buying unpasteurized milkOn numerous other issues, they seem to pick a position and then torture data until they confess. And that is a concern about all their findings. In the case of gun violence there is a concern about their numbers they replaced one hospital in a small (60) sample with one that had more than 100 times greater non-fatal gun injuries its predecessor ever had. The new hospital added over 22,000 gun injuries to the 2015 national estimate which made gun violence look more common.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land says that up to 183 million more people will be at risk of hunger and solutions proposed to mitigate climate change will lead to a ~20% increase in hunger in Africa, southeast Asia, and India but it will be felt everywhere. Devang Mehta says that's why he came away from the report more frustrated than ever with mainstream public environmentalism and what one policy expert has called, “the empty radicalism of the climate apocalypse.”

Since 1981, the beef industry had reduced emission intensity by 14 percent and reduced emissions due to land use change by 42 percent, yet in Australia, as in other developed countries, activists have done with emissions what they did with low-fat diets: Exaggerated a problem that does not exist to get money advocating for a solution that won't make any difference.Australians seem to be willing to stand up for reason at a time when American (and British) journalists are more interested in evangelizing claims by their political allies.

Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4), The strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum that causes Fusarium wilt and which devastated crops in Asia, has been confirmed in Latin America, the world’s largest exporter of bananas. Signs of the fungus were first spotted in June in northern Colombia, and the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) in Bogotá has now announced plans to eradicate plants on nearly 170 hectares of quarantined farmland.

Supplement salespeople, senescence biologists, and demographers have been scrambling to find ways to say their products or research are the secret to longevity. And super-centenarians, those who live to be 110, are most prized of all in those efforts.But commonality is hard. Some drink alcohol, some don't touch it, some smoke, some don't eat meat, but it turns out many of them share a common trait - lack of an accurate birth record, finds a recent study.