Public health officials state that vaccines are safe and effective, but the truth is far more complicated. Vaccination is a serious medical intervention that always carries the potential to injure and cause death as well as to prevent disease. Coercive vaccination policies deprive people of free and informed consent--the hallmark of ethical medicine. Americans are increasingly concerned about vaccine safety and the right to make individual, informed choices together with their healthcare practitioners. Vaccine Epidemic focuses on the searing debate surrounding individual and...

This follow-up to Naturally Curious, a National Outdoor Book Award winner, is a day-by-day account of nature observations throughout the year. Daily entries include entertaining and enlightening observations about specific animal or plant activity happening in eastern North America on that date. Set up as a naturalist's journal, entries describe in detail sightings and events in the natural world and are accompanied by stunning color photographs of birds, animals, insects, plants, and more. Essays throughout describe specific events in nature happening during each month, while sidebars supply...

In 2006, following an expedited review, the Food and Drug Administration approved Merck & Co.'s Gardasil vaccine, a "preventive" vaccine targeting a limited range of strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV), including two strains that are linked to the possible development of cervical cancers. In 2009, the FDA, in another "fast track" review, approved Cervarix, a similar vaccine by another pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline.

In The HPV Vaccine, Mary Holland and Kim Mack Rosenberg, expert researchers on the making, marketing, and safety of vaccines, assess the quick popularity of the...