When there's an outbreak of deaths or illnesses from injected street drugs, do public health authorities demand diabetics and doctors stop using syringes? Of course not. Yet a host of public officials — from President Trump to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to members of the Squad — are taking just that sort of approach in responding to the spate of vaping-related illnesses and deaths around the country.

Cuomo, for example, went on a tear Sunday about vaping, calling it "a burgeoning health crisis" and threatening to declare an emergency to ban flavored nicotine e-cigarettes. That followed Trump's announcement last Wednesday of federal plans to prohibit such devices.

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Some medical conditions are especially frustrating to physicians because they lack not only effective treatments but even a reliable means of diagnosis. One of the most common of these is variously known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). As the name suggests, it is a syndrome, a group of symptoms that seem to characterize, or define, an illness, even if we don't know how they're related or what causes them. That's different from better-understood illnesses such as solid tumors, rheumatoid arthritis, or stroke, for example.

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In The Wealth of Nations, the 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith observed about the chicanery of some businessmen, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Nowhere is that truer than in today's organic agriculture and food industries, whose bamboozling of the public relies on chicanery and misrepresentations.

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The Trump administration is conducting a search for a replacement for Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who resigned as head of the Food and Drug Administration in March. The position is one of the most important in the federal government, because the FDA is ubiquitous in Americans' lives.

The agency regulates pharmaceutical and other products that account for more than $1 trillion dollars annually — 25 cents of every consumer dollar; and the average cost (including out-of-pocket expenses and opportunity costs) to bring a new drug to market is more than $2.5 billion.

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Much of the medical progress in the past half-century has involved expensive, high-tech diagnostic tests and therapies. But it would be a mistake to gainsay the value of inexpensive, low-tech innovations.

Consider the problem of falls, which are both a cause and effect of declining health in the elderly. They are the leading cause of injury-related visits to U.S. emergency rooms and of accidental deaths for Americans over 65. Preventing falls or reducing their impact would help millions of people and moderate health-care costs significantly.

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