Health

Enzyme Potentiated Desensitisation is a groundbreaking treatment for allergy sufferers. But the recent closure of a firm championing EPD leaves its future in doubt. Drug companies and mainstream doctors are unlikely to be mourning, says Charlotte Davis

Despite being used to treat diabetes and infections, knowledge of Alaska's wild berries is in danger of being lost as young indigenous people embrace western lifestyles. Jessica Wapner reports

Delny Britton investigates the hidden impacts of western mainstream medicine - including pollution from pharmaceutical products, high carbon emissions and adverse drug reactions - and asks whether the healthcare sector can ever be truly sustainable

The economic and climate-related impacts of forest destruction are well known, but continued logging could unleash devastating new pandemics and spread fatal diseases into the human population, scientists tell the Ecologist

Despite disturbing claims about the impact of uranium, ten-thousand proposals for exploration in the Grand Canyon area have been submitted. A key fuel for nuclear power, the US must now decide between full scale uranium mining, partial mining or a twenty year moratorium. Leana Hosia investigates

After the Clean Air Acts banished the smogs of the 50s and 60s, many thought that air pollution problems had disappeared. They were wrong

A huge number of UK citizens take food supplements or buy health food products, yet new legislation threatens to either remove these items from our shelves, restrict their dosages or ban them from making any health claims

It was the drug that fuelled the sexual liberation of the 1960s, but what price are we paying for our love of the contraceptive Pill?

In a matter of months, an Irish mobile network will launch 'Firefly' - the mobile phone for kids. With even official Government advice against such a move, Yanar Alkayat takes a timely look at what we know for certain about mobile phones and health

When PCB transformers exploded in a New York university in 1991, contaminating the campus with dioxins, it set Eric Francis Coppolino on the path to becoming an environmental journalist.

Britain has a serious and unnecessary drug habit, but the implications of our pill-forevery-ill culture go far beyond the adverse effects on human health. The complex chemicals in modern pharmaceuticals, as well as the manufacturing processes involved, leave a massive industrial footprint on the natural world that is largely ignored by both science and government.

In the last few years the Ecologist has written extensively on the flu – both the garden variety that strikes us on an annual basis and the wider threat of avian influenza, H5N1.

MPs, medical professionals and scientists unite in demanding a thorough evaluation of the utility of vivisection. By Kathy Archibald, Science Director of Europeans for Medical Progress

If we truly knew about flu, and the lack of effectiveness of the vaccine being offered as protection, would we really be so obedient about getting the jab?

A dose of flu in winter is as inevitable as a broken boiler – and usually as harmless. But as public health expert Dr Michael Greger explains, intensive farming of animals around the globe may mean we are hatching out an influenza timebomb

What on earth are we thinking when we go into shops and buy lots of pointless stuff we just don’t need? John Naish says it’s not so much what’s on our minds, but which brain we use when we spend

Unpasteurised milk can be a divisive subject, says Laura Sevier, but most of what you hear about the white stuff is pure whitewash

Credited in the Guiness book of records as the world's most slippery substance, Teflon has escaped the scrutiny of environmental regulators for 50 years. Now evidence suggests that the chemicals that leak from the Teflon pans during cooking may be more harmful to the environment and human health that DDT

Environmental toxins have given us lesbian seagulls and transgender crabs, but pollutants may also be causing gender ambiguity in humans, says Eric Francis

Environmental group Global Response has challenged Wal-Mart’s claim that their Love, Earth jewelery is ‘committed to protecting the environment’.

Must-have handbags? shoes to die for? From cheap trinkets to luxury car interiors, Jim Wickens discovers the startling facts behind what we buy into when we buy leather goods.

It usually takes a major public health crisis to remove profitable toxins completely from marketplace. In the meantime most of us continue to be exposed to a variety of profitable poisons, including:

What do government and industry do when something is toxic but massively profitable? Most of the time, says Devra Davis, they just invest in better class of PR…

Mercury is the second most toxic metal in the world, and yet it's still being used to make fillings. Nick Kettles wonders if the dental establishment is away with the tooth fairies.