The top 10 health news stories would be difficult to pin down if WebMD.com,  Reuters, and a few others hadn’t done a lot of the work. Still, no health publisher mirrored another. So these are my picks. I culled some from national media; others I watched locally so they won’t match the national pundits. While these stories made the biggest splashes, other stories are out there that are quietly just as important. As for the countdown? That’s for suspense.

10  While 2008 showed no major breakthroughs in cancer research, cases of cancer deaths  dropped for the second straight year, the American Cancer Society says. Thank more awareness of catching cancer early and the decrease in smoking and smoking prohibition laws which also cut down on second-hand smoke.

9. The end of cheap food  arrived along with $4 gas, crop shortages, China’s hungry population competing for food, and fear mongering about things as abundant as rice. Fresh food took the biggest hits. Suddenly, tangerines were 99 cents apiece and that $5 a pound steak was $13 a pound.

8. Cyberbullying became a household word when an adult woman disguised as a teenager pushed an emotionally disturbed 13-year-old girl into suicide. The issue finally persuaded lawmakers that bullying is a major mental health issue.

7.  Can vaccines trigger autism in children? The feds said, no but just as quickly compensated a woman and her daughter from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program after the girl developed an illness suspected of being linked to a vaccine she took. The debate will get louder this year.

6. The presence of bisphenol A, a chemical found in the plastic used in baby bottles, scared a lot of mothers and prompted the feds to investigate if plastic bottles were poisoning our kids. UPDATE: The feds report they haven’t found a hazard and the manufacturers have mounted a spin campaign.

5. We learned the importance of Vitamin D and that most of the country is deficient. Vitamin D is vital to a lot more body functions than previously known and the federal recommendations are much too low. 

4. The promise of health care reform was a key issue in the election of President Elect Barack Obama and the shift in congressional power from Republican to Democrat;

3.  Americans learned that President Bush through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, had been funding the establishment of more sliding-scale medical clinics around the country as a way to deliver health care to the nation’s uninsured.  St. Louis has four of the walk-in clinics. The national press missed the bigger story, but local media reported it city by city and clinic by clinic. Did Mr. Bush know something we didn’t? As in:

2. The rising numbers of unemployed people  threatens to tax the nation’s health care system past its limits. It’s a triple-whammy: The system already struggles with 47 million uninsured and the front end of the Baby Boomer generation is retiring. Now, add millions of new people who a year ago were working and putting money into the system who now are not working and drawing resources out.

1. Salmonella-tainted tomatoes sickened 1,400 people and damaged American confidence in U.S. food safety. The context of the scare followed the tainted spinach scare of a year earlier, mad cow disease scare before that, and the public frustration that it took weeks for America’s food police to track down the salmonella contamination. On the bright side, the scare prompted new attention to locally grown produce so much so that it’s now selling in local grocery stores.

HONORABLE MENTION: Even the least expensive generic statin drugs meant for cholesterol therapy were found to have multiple health benefits ranging from fighting heart disease to easing the effects of diabetes; the death of ABC newsman Tim Russert focused new attention to heart disease; belly fat was found to be a health problem all it’s own; and, tens of thousands more people are walking around with HIV/AIDS disease and don’t know it.