kavin submitted, created time 5 months 1 week (blogs.wsj.com)

Doctors and medical associations have taken plenty of lumps for relying on drug companies to sponsor continuing medical education courses. Critics say the sessions are often biased in favor of a particular medicine or drugs over alternative treatments for disease.

Now add journalists to the groups that are getting professional education subsidized by Big Pharma.

At the Unity convention in Chicago-–a gathering of thousands of minority journalists-–the diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk sponsored a lunch yesterday called, “The Diabetes Explosion: A Call to Action for Journalists of Color

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kavin submitted, created time 8 months 1 week (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Baby rice, the bland porridge sold in supermarkets for weaning infants, can contain potentially dangerous levels of arsenic, according to new research done in the United Kingdom. The discovery calls for more attention to food-production sources, the authors say, but experts are divided on the value of the study. Some thinks it should highlight the need for the European Union and the United States to restrict arsenic in food as well as water. The other advise that it should be careful before telling people to throw their rice out.

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Sue Wu submitted, created time 10 months 4 days (discovermagazine.com)

For much of 2005 and 2006, headlines about bird flu were sensational (“Virus 911”), fearmongering (“Bird Flu: We’re All Going to Die”), and plentiful, running in major papers daily. The

8 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: politics science and culture the media bird flu influenza the flu flu avian flu H5N1 bird flu