In a confounding twist to the adage about moderate alcohol intake, scientists from Oxford University have concluded that consuming even one alcoholic beverage per day increases cancer risk in women.

Naomi Allen and colleagues reached the heartbreaking conclusion after reviewing the records of nearly 1.3 million middle aged women from the UK who had been followed for an average of 7.2 years as part of the Million Women Study.

Specific forms of cancer that were increased included oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus, larynx, rectum, liver, breast, and total cancer.

For the first 4 of these, cancers of the upper respiratory and digestive systems, the increased risk was limited to smokers.

The trends were similar for women who drank wine exclusively, beer exclusivity, hard stuff or all of the above.

“The take-home message,” Allen told the San Francisco Chronicle, is that “regularly drinking even one drink per day (is) increasing your risk for cancer.”

The write-up appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“I thought drinking wine was good for you,” Mirella Romansini protested to the Chronicle. “Now they are saying it increases your risk for cancer? I’m surprised.”

US Dietary Guidelines say moderate alcohol intake can reduce cardiovascular risk and suggest it’s OK for women to have a drink a day unless they’re young, pregnant or at risk for alcohol dependency.

But they never actually recommended that people consume alcohol for health reasons.

“It’s a level of consumption that generally has been found in scientific studies to be associated with a relatively low risk of harms,” the CDC’s Robert Brewer explained to the Chronicle while backpedaling, “but low risk does not mean no risk.”

Uh-huh.

Last month the Big O sent a secret letter to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in which he offered to back off a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Russia stopped Iran from developing ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

That’s the biggest trade since Wilt Chamberlain to the Lakers for Darrell Imhoff, Archie Clark and Jerry Chambers.

The Bear maintains commercial, diplomatic and military ties to Tehran so it can exert influence there.

And although Russia never seemes to care that Iran’s mullahs have nuclear ambitions, it vehemently objected when George W. Bush proposed deploying a US-built interceptor system to knock out Iranian missiles before they hit Western Europe.

Not a man of tact, Bush additionally proposed positioning the “defensive” missiles in Eastern European countries that were, along with Russia, part of the good old USS of R.

Setting aside the fact that these interceptor missile systems don’t work yet, Bush’s idea might have gone forward except that he rejected Moscow’s proposal to install part of the system on Russian territory and give the Russians access to the on-off switch.

 “It’s almost saying to them, put up or shut up,” a senior administration official said of the Big O’s overture. “It’s not that the Russians get to say, ‘We’ll try and therefore you have to suspend.’ It says the threat has to go away.”

Kommersant, a Moscow-based, state-run newspaper called the Big O’s a “sensational proposal,” and a day later Medvedev himself said he believed the Big O was serious about cooperation on missile defense.

“We have already received such signals from our American colleagues,” he said on the Kremlin Web site. “I expect that these signals will turn into concrete proposals…

I hope to discuss this issue of great importance for Europe during my first meeting with President Barack Obama.”

That’s scheduled for April 2, in London. A properly-labeled reset button will be available.

In the summer of 2005, physicians were growing concerned that Seroquel, AstraZeneca’s $4.4 billion antipsychotic drug was causing their patients to gain weight, so AZ employee Christine Nee instructed her sales force to assure physicians there was no evidence its drug did that.

“Our objective is to neutralize customer objections to Seroquel’s weight and diabetes profile…(and to then) refocus the call” Ney said.

The problem AZ’s got is that 5 years earlier, its drug-safety expert Wayne Geller told Dutch regulatory authorities there was “reasonable evidence to suggest that Seroquel therapy can cause impaired glucose regulation including diabetes mellitus in certain individuals.”

These tidbits were culled from 100 evidentiary documents unsealed last week as part of an agreement between the Swedish/British giant and thousands of plaintiffs who believe they’ve been harmed by Seroquel.

It was not immediately clear how the new developments would affect the progress of the long, multi-theater legal battle, in which AZ had actually been doing pretty well for itself, thank you very much.

After many of the cases were consolidated in Florida’s US District Court, AZ scored a big win when the first 2 test cases were thrown out because the judge felt the evidence failed to prove Seroquel caused the plaintiff’s diabetes.

Next thing you know, 2,300 more cases were dismissed on similar grounds.

But AZ still faces battles in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Montana, Arkansas and South Carolina state courts, where among other things, states are claiming the drug giant bilked them into paying for off-label use of Seroquel.

AZ spokesperson Tony Jewell told the Wall Street Journal that, “from the time it was first approved, the Seroquel labeling alerted physicians that diabetes mellitus, hyperglycemia and weight gain had been observed in clinical trials. We’ve continued to update the label as the findings have developed.”

Jewell added that Geller’s document didn’t reflect AZ’s position when he wrote it. “In fact,” Jewell clarified, “it was not Dr. Geller’s ultimate view either. It was an initial draft for discussion purposes.”