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Full Version: No firm evidence on coffee as cancer risk + Hairy problem with drug testing
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The science behind cancer warnings on coffee is murky at best
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...murky-best

EXCERPT: Californians will soon be taking their coffee with cream and a cancer warning, after a court ruled that the state’s retailers must label coffee as containing a carcinogen. The decision followed an eight-year legal battle, which boiled down to a question that has plagued coffee drinkers and scientists alike: Is drinking coffee healthy, or not?

The judge’s ruling, issued Wednesday, says that Starbucks and other coffee sellers failed to show that the health benefits of the brew, which include lowering heart disease, outweigh its cancer risk. But do the new warnings mean you should put your mug down? Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about coffee’s health effects, both good and bad....

MORE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...murky-best



The Hairy Problem With Drug Testing
https://www.wired.com/story/the-hairy-pr...g-testing/

EXCERPT: [police departments, testing for drug use via hair samples]. . . Thus began a scientific back-and-forth that has continued to this day. Scientists like [David] Kidwell argue that both external and ingested cocaine binds to melanin in the hair. People with black hair have more melanin in general, but especially more of the subtype eumelanin, which studies have shown binds particularly well with cocaine and amphetamines. (Gray hair doesn’t have much of any type of melanin, so if you want to get away with using cocaine, aging may be your best bet.) And researchers disagree over whether hair can ever be washed clean of any and all drugs it could have come into contact with from the outside.

Despite those questions, both the Boston and New York police departments, 10 to 15 percent of Fortune 500 companies, court systems, federal reserve banks, and numerous high schools still use the hair test. The FBI phased it out in 2009, then re-implemented it in 2014. About 200,000 drug tests are run on hair in the US every year.

[...] “I am not sure there will ever be absolute settlement,” says Bruce Goldberger, the chief of forensic medicine and a professor of toxicology at University of Florida Health. He was the first person to find a way to identify the difference between heroin and morphine in a drug hair test.

The law has generally sided with Pyschemedics [a testing company]. But in 2012, the state of Massachusetts ruled that the hair test alone is not enough to terminate employment. Six police officers were reinstated in their jobs, and Hogan finally graduated from the police academy. She and the other plaintiffs are now in a federal court, asserting that the test is specifically discriminatory.

The stakes are high...

MORE: https://www.wired.com/story/the-hairy-pr...g-testing/