By Nicholas D. Kristof from The New York Times

Scientists are observing with increasing alarm that some very common hormone-mimicking chemicals can have grotesque effects.

A widely used herbicide acts as a female hormone and feminizes male animals in the wild. Thus male frogs can have female organs, and some male fish actually produce eggs. In a Florida lake contaminated by these chemicals, male alligators have tiny penises.

These days there is also growing evidence linking this class of chemicals to problems in humans. These include breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early menstruation and even diabetes and obesity.

Philip Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says that a congenital defect called hypospadias — a misplacement of the urethra — is now twice as common among newborn boys as it used to be. He suspects endocrine disruptors, so called because they can wreak havoc with the endocrine system that governs hormones.

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By Marina Kamenev from The Atlantic

In 1997 Kevin Sorbo, known for his starring role in the television series Hercules, felt a searing pain in his left shoulder during a workout. Thinking it was a strain, he went to see his chiropractor, who manipulated his neck for treatment. Several days later the actor suffered a stroke and a recent article in Neurology Now links the aneurysm with the actions of his chiropractor. The article is currently used as reference material by a prominent group of Australian doctors, medical researchers, and scientists who are trying to curb what they refer to as pseudosciences, like branches of chiropractic practice, right at their root: the universities where they are taught.

Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM) already has 450 members. They include Ian Frazer, the inventor of the cervical cancer vaccine, and Sir Gustav Nossal, a renowned immunologist. Among their group, 50 are international and they too hope to snuff out what they refer to as modern-day quackery. The group has written a letter to all of Australia’s university vice-chancellors asking them to: “Reverse the trend which sees government-funded tertiary institutions offering courses in the health care sciences that are not underpinned by convincing scientific evidence.”

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By Judith Shulevitz from The New Republic

When, armed with an infant, you descend into the nether world of urban playgrounds and playdates and long, searching conversations about upper-middle-class parental obsessions (gluten allergies, Mandarin classes), you’re likely to find yourself wondering whether you’ve joined a genial but nutty sect. Rumor runs rampant; information is so copious and conflicting there might as well be none at all; skepticism and standards of scientific evidence shimmer and vanish at the hint of something to worry about. Not long before my entry onto the mommy track, parental anxiety spiked over the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, linked, by a sketchy and quickly refuted study, to autism. The supposed connection made a bigger impression than the refutation, and, while I didn’t actually know anyone who failed to get their children immunized for MMR, plenty of parents did refuse the shot; vaccination rates have plummeted in communities around the country in recent years. The decisions of these parents seems both tragic and telling. Vaccines rank among the greatest triumphs of modern medicine, but, since a vaccine can entail introducing dead infectious matter and potentially toxic chemicals into a healthy body, it also demands trust. Rejecting a vaccine for one’s child seems as strong an expression of distrust—of science, of medicine, of technology—as a non-Christian Scientist parent could make.

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By Haley Sweetland Edwards from The Atlantic

Qatar is a tiny country with a big problem.

This Connecticut-sized nation, sticking out like a loose tooth in the Persian Gulf, is one of the most obese nations in the world, with residents fatter, on average, than even those of the United States, which often takes the cake in such competitions.

According to recent studies, roughly half of adults and a third of children in Qatar are obese, and almost 17 percent of the native population suffers from diabetes. By comparison, about a third of Americans are obese, and eight percent are diabetic. Qatar also has very high rates of birth defects and genetic disorders — problems that, along with the prevalence of obesity (PDF) and diabetes, have worsened in recent decades, according to local and international health experts.

So what’s going wrong in little Qatar?

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Ariel Young, 20, a George Washington University student, says she shares text messages with friends on healthy foods and recipes. Photo by Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

By Milt Freudenheim from The New York Times

With smartphones changing the culture in so many ways, more and more young people are using their mobile devices to keep track of their health, and the trend is not going unnoticed by advertisers.

Young adults are much more likely than older people to have a smartphone and to use it to look for health information, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which surveys technology trends. And their health concerns differ markedly from those of older people.

Nearly 100 million Americans own a smartphone, but “younger people use them very differently,” said John Mangano, a vice president of comScore, an online research firm. Three of the top five symptoms searched for on Yahoo Mobile in January were early pregnancy, herpes and H.I.V. None of these symptoms showed up among the top searches on desktop computers, which are more likely to be used by older people.

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By Lisa Zamosky from WebMD

After hearing three days of heated arguments this week regarding key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the nine justices of the Supreme Court will cast their initial votes today. Their decisions may change before the final ruling expected by the end of June, but in the meantime, the country is now left to wait and wonder about the law’s ultimate fate.

Here, WebMD answers some frequently asked questions about the Supreme Court case, breaking down a number of possible ways in which the court could rule, and the potential effects of those decisions.

Could the whole law be overturned? If so, what happens?

Yes, one possibility is that the Supreme Court justices will decide to toss out the entire law.

“If the entire law is overturned, we go back to the way things were before the law took effect in March 2010,” says Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a California-based health care consumer advocacy coalition.

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Is more than overeating to blame? Photo by Tobyotter

From the Smithsonian

Obesity, it would seem, is one big “My bad,” a painfully visible failure in personal responsibility. If you regularly chow down a pizza and a pint of ice cream for dinner, and your idea of a vigorous workout is twisting off caps on two-liter bottles of Coke, well, it’s pretty hard to give yourself a pass for packing on pounds.

Certainly, most doctors and dieticians still believe that being overweight is a matter of too many calories in, and not enough calories out, or put more bluntly, way too much food and way too little exercise. It’s all about overconsumption, right? End of story.

Except the plot appears to be thickening.

Recent research is beginning to suggest that other factors are at work, specifically chemicals used to treat crops and to process and package food.  Scientists call them obesogens and  in one study at the University of California, Irvine, they caused animals to have more and larger fat cells.  ”The animals we treat with these chemicals don’t eat a different diet than the ones who don’t get fat,” explained lead researcher Bruce Blumberg. “They eat the same diet–we’re not challenging them with a high-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet. They’re eating normal foods and they’re getting fatter.”

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Chinese women who need a public toilet often face a long wait. They can pass the time watching men saunter into theirs. Now, some are protesting. Photo by Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

By Sharon LaFraniere from The New York Times

Wang Jianyi, 26, was in a huge hurry. She had been riding the bus for three hours. At each rest stop, the line outside the women’s toilet was too long for her to use the restroom.

So as soon as she arrived at a major inter-city bus terminal in Beijing on Monday morning, she made a beeline for the nearest public restroom. Only to encounter yet another line.

“I have been holding my pee for an hour,” she said in frustration as she waited for a women’s stall while a few feet away, men sauntered in and out without delay. “I think there should definitely be more stalls for women, because women take longer.”

At least twice as long, studies suggest. Despite that, national standards for public street toilets in urban China recommend a one-to-one ratio of men’s stalls, including urinals, to women’s stalls. Since sanitation workers — almost uniformly women — routinely take over at least one women’s stall for their cleaning supplies, women typically end up with even less opportunity to relieve themselves.

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By Kathleen Doheny from Webmd

U.S. children and teenshave cut down on added sugars but still eat too much, according to a new report.

“Added sugar consumption is high among children and teens,” says Cynthia L. Ogden, PhD, an epidemiologist with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which issued the report.

About 16% of total calories eaten by children and teens are from added sugars, Ogden found.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines recommend limiting intake of ”discretionary” calories, including added sugars and solid fats, to a total of 5% to 15% daily.

The new report is published as an NCHS Data Brief.

Ogden examined data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It is a government survey that assesses the health and nutritional status of the U.S. population.

Added sugars are defined as sweeteners added to processed and prepared foods. Eating too much added sugar has been linked to weight gain and an increase in cholesterol levels in teens that may raise the risk of heart disease.

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By Daniel J. DeNoon from Webmd.com

Deathly ill patients, many of them children, aren’t getting the drugs they desperately need.

Why? The drugs — most of them sterile, injectable drugs used to treat cancer or infections or for anesthesia during operations — are in short supply.

Every year since 2001, there have been more and more drug shortages. This year there may be an estimated 200 to 300 drug shortages, far outpacing the record set just last year.

“Usually these are inexpensive generic drugs that have been available for a long time,” pediatric oncologist Bruce Bostrom, MD, of Children’s Hospitals of Minnesota, tells WebMD. “They are only made by a few companies. So if one plant goes down for improper manufacturing practices, the others can’t make up the difference.”

But expensive brand-name drugs are only made by single companies, too. Aren’t they hit by shortages?

“The very expensive drugs still on patent? I have never seen a shortage,” Bostrom says.

Bostrom isn’t a whiner. He’s on the front lines. The drugs he needs are for kids who will die if they don’t get them.

One of those kids is Rowan Carr, who was 3 years old in August 2010. That’s when her mom learned Rowan had a deadly form of leukemia.

“Rowan’s leukemia has a 90% to 95% cure rate. We look at it as a 5% chance she could die,” Brenda Carr tells me. We hold on to that hope, but we have it only because of the strides made in curing childhood leukemia. And now this key medicine — that every kid with leukemia needs — is not available?”

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