“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln by Barbara Loe Fisher In America today, there is an unprecedented assault on the human right to exercise informed consent to medical risk-taking. It…

The following excerpts from today’s NY Times article point to serious failures of data collection, analysis, and commitment to safety at FDA.

From Reuters and the NY POst: Prosecutors will ask a judge to dismiss all charges in the [ criminal ] sexual assault case against former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn at a court hearing on Tuesday, the New York Post reported on Sunday, citing unnamed sources.

From McNeill and Adelstein at The Independent : It is one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the 11 March earthquake inflict on the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: if the earthquake structurally compromised the plant and the…

Well-known arms control/disarmament/nonproliferation expert Jonathan Tucker died last week at 56.

Someone got inhalation anthrax along the old west cattle trail.

Extraneous materials in vaccines is an old story.

From the Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, Frontline and ProPublica authors: A federal judge has blocked, at least temporarily, a Justice Department attempt to back away from court admissions that appeared to undercut previous FBI assertions that an Army researcher was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks. In an…

Thanks to Ed Silverman at Pharmalot for posting on this issue, and for his links. I’ve blogged in the past here

According to the European Medicines Agency press release : The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) considered that the epidemiological studies relating to Pandemrix in Finland and Sweden were well designed and the results show an association between Pandemrix vaccination and narcolepsy