An Auckland paediatric surgeon has hit out against calls for routine circumcision of newborn boys, saying the risks of the painful "non-consensual mutilation" far outweigh any benefits.

Dr Neil Price, of Starship Children's Health, questioned a study led by Sydney University professor of medicine Brian Morris which claimed evidence in favour of infant circumcision was overwhelming.

Dr Price said any health benefit was very small when put into context and compared to the risk of complications such as bleeding and damage to the penis.

He also questioned the ethics of performing such a "painful procedure on a non-consenting infant".

"If anyone believes that this is not painful they should just listen to the screams that accompany blood testing and immunisation in babies and they should get an idea that 'yes, infants do feel pain'."

About 10 per cent of New Zealand's male babies are circumcised - often for cultural or religious reasons.

The Government pays for the procedure only for medical reasons, such as frequent infections.

In a move to avoid being slapped with a cancer warning label, Coca-Cola is making an emergency recipe alteration that involves removing a known carcinogen from the mix. Showing that the company is more interested in preserving sales than actually ridding its products of known cancer-causing substances, the company chose to remove the toxic ingredient to avoid the warning label - not to actively protect the health of the consumer. The compound (used for the drinks' caramel coloring), known as 4-methylimidazole (4-MI or 4-MEI), has been ousted by the Center for Sciences in the Public Interest as a powerful carcinogen.

In fact, the Coca-Cola company even denied the cancer link, stating that the findings by CSPI and others were simply untrue. Calling the warning label 'scientifically unfounded', Coca-Cola says that there is no public health risk that justifies any change.

"While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning," Coca-Cola representative Diana Garza-Ciarlante told the Associated Press news agency.

Scientists have concluded that a variety of environmental toxicants can have negative effects on the next three generations of offspring of exposed animals, by causing epigenetic changes to their genome.

Researchers from Washington State University investigated the effects of several chemicals on the offspring of exposed female rats, including the dioxin TCDD and a mixture of bisphenol A and phthalates in addition to pesticides and jet-fuel. The results showed that all the chemicals caused epigenetic changes in the genome of up to three generations of offspring. Also observed in non-exposed offspring were effects such as females reaching puberty earlier, increased rates in the decay and death of sperm cells and lower numbers of ovarian follicles that later become eggs.

The scientists therefore concluded that the ability to promote transgenerational disease is not unique to a small number of chemicals, but instead might be a characteristic of many environmental compounds.

The research is published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Fresh concerns following the 1988 Camelford water pollution disaster will be aired this week.

Twenty-four years ago, one of the UK's most notorious pollution disasters occurred. At a water treatment works on the edge of Bodmin Moor, 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate leaked into the water supply serving the nearby town of Camelford.

Years of bitter disputes followed, with people who had drunk the water complaining of health problems. There were government inquiries, accusations of a cover-up - and, in 2004, the death of Carole Cross. This 58-year-old Camelford resident died from a rare and aggressive form of Alzheimer's, and her brain was found to contain unusually high levels of aluminium.

The inquest into the cause of Mrs Cross's death, delayed twice in the past few years, is set to report this week. Among those who will be watching the outcome with interest is Professor Chris Exley, who was called in nearly eight years ago to examine Mrs Cross's brain (it contained 23 micrograms of aluminium per gram of brain, compared to normal levels of 0‑2mcg).

But Prof Exley, a world-renowned expert on aluminium, hopes the inquest will do more than finally establish the truth about why Mrs Cross died (he is convinced that aluminium from the drinking water played a role in her mental deterioration). He also hopes it will highlight how little we know about the implications for our health of the most prolific metal on the planet.

Aluminium, he argues, is now added to or used in almost everything we eat, drink, inject or absorb. At high levels, it is an established neurotoxin - yet no one knows whether the levels we are ingesting are safe.

I don't believe in the Loch Ness monster. I don't think government scientists are autopsying aliens in Area 51 or plotting a vast conspiracy from a bunker at the North Pole. But for the past two years, I've lived through an experience that has felt, at times, like a real-life episode of "The X-Files."

What happened is this: My husband became frighteningly, mysteriously ill. And when two doctors finally fit the puzzle pieces of his symptoms together, we discovered that, according to medical authorities, his disease does not officially exist.

Pat's symptoms came on gradually - so gradually, it took us years to realize he was sick. Longtime hikers, in 2008 we backpacked through Washington state for five days, lugging 45-pound packs over rugged mountain passes rippling with wildflowers.

"This seems a lot harder than it usually does," Pat remarked one day, taking an uncharacteristic rest break halfway up a hill. Then his muscles began to stiffen up after long car rides. In 2009 his usual runs on the treadmill became too taxing. By June of 2010 Pat couldn't make it to the gym at all. He was so tired, he needed a two-hour nap every night after work. One night he got home an hour late: He'd forgotten the name of our Metro stop and had kept riding the trains back and forth until he remembered.

Guessing that, at age 49, his problem might be hormonal, Pat made an appointment with an endocrinologist. While he waited six weeks for the appointment, he started wearing wool socks to bed because his feet were now inexplicably freezing. He began to stumble when walking, occasionally bumping into walls. The joint pain started up a few weeks later: a feeling of electrical shocks shooting through his knees and elbows. Numbness in his hands began making it hard to type. He'd sometimes choke while drinking and stumble over words.

When Pat finally saw the endocrinologist, the doctor confidently dismissed the odd array of symptoms as impossible. "The mind is very powerful," he explained.

Kellogg's is a company that, in my view, makes a lot of quite-crappy food, particularly breakfast cereals made from highly processed grains with added sugar that are highly disruptive to blood sugar and may well pose hazards for health. Not that you're likely to learn any of this from Kellogg's itself, as it continues to market it wares as healthy and wholesome.

The Advertising Standards Authority has recently upheld a complaint regarding the way Kellogg's advertising appeared to give sugar a clean of health. You can read the adjudication here.

The adjudication refers several times to a consultation report held by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (both part of the United Nations) in 1998. This report largely exonerated sugar in terms of its impact on things like obesity and heart disease. However, should we be so trusting of the findings and conclusions of this report?

McDonald's and Taco Bell have banned it, but now the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is picking up 7 million pounds of beef containing ammonium hydroxide-treated ground connective tissue and meat scraps and serving it up to America's school kids. If you thought cafeteria food was gross before....

According to TheDaily.com, the term "pink slime" was coined by microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, formerly of the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service. He first saw it being mixed into burger meat when he was touring a Beef Products Inc (BPI) facility in 2002 after an outbreak of salmonella. "Scientists in D.C. were pressured to approve this stuff with minimal safety approval," Zirnstein told The Daily.

"Pink slime," which is officially called "Lean Beef Trimmings," is banned for human consumption in the United Kingdom. It is commonly used in dog and chicken food. Celebrity chef and safe food advocate Jamie Oliver featured the substance and called for its ban on the April 12, 2011 episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which may have influenced McDonald's to stop using beef patties containing the filler.

For quite some time the link between juvenile onset diabetes (type 1) and cow's milk consumption has been noted in the scientific literature. You can view 12 such references on our Cow's Milk Page. In genetically susceptible individuals the consumption of cow's milk may trigger an autoimmune destruction of the beta cells in the pancreas which produce insulin. A new study, published in the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, has shed light on a possible new mechanism behind this connection.

Finish researchers looked at 1113 infants with a genetic susceptibility to type 1 diabetes and who were randomly assigned to receive one of three infant formulas during the first 6 months of life whenever breast milk was not available:

1. Cow's milk formula (CMF)
2. Whey-based hydrolyzed formula (WHF)
3. Whey-based formula free of bovine insulin (insulin-free CMF)

Beta cell autoimmunity was monitored at ages 3,6, and 12 months and then annually until 3 years of age. The results were reported as follows:

In comparison with ordinary CMF, weaning to an insulin-free CMF reduced the cumulative incidence of autoantibodies by age 3 years in children at genetic risk of type 1 diabetes mellitus.

The likelihood of finding autoantibodies associated with beta cell autoimmunity was 25% lower in the whey-based hydrolyzed formula group, and 61% lower in the insulin-free whey-based formula when compared with the cow's milk formula group.

The humble organ may help us recover from serious infections

You may have heard that the appendix is a relic of our past, like the hind leg bones of a whale. Bill Parker, a professor of surgery at the Duke University School of Medicine, heard that, too; he just disagrees. Parker thinks the appendix serves as a "nature reserve" for beneficial bacteria in our gut. When we get a severe gut infection such as cholera (which happened often during much of our history and is common in many regions even today), the bene­ficial bacteria in our gut are depleted. The appendix allows them to be re­stored. In essence, Parker sees the appendix as a sanctuary for our tiny mutualist friends, a place where there is always room at the inn.

Parker's hypothesis, which he and collaborators first published in 2007 in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, is a fundamentally new idea about how an organ in our body works. A paper published last December provides new data to back up the theory.

The medical industry's obsession with bigger, more powerful (and above all, patentable!) medicines may lead to killer pandemics.

We frequently discuss the global threat of superbugs - drug-resistant bacteria, which are created in two ways:

• If a drug can kill, say, 95% of bacteria, the 5% that remain are by definition much stronger than the others, not killed by current medicines, and can then reproduce without any interference or competition from other bacteria, allowing them to quickly take over.
• Drugs target specific bacterial proteins, so any new mutation in these proteins will interfere with or negate the drug's destructive effect, resulting in antibiotic resistance. Drug resistance is a natural response to pressures imposed on any living organism: you must adapt, or you die. Many adapt. Many become resistant to more than one drug, making them even harder to kill.

A few weeks ago we told you about weeds becoming resistant to the lethal pesticide Roundup, creating strains of "superweeds." It's the same principle at work.