Our New York readers should be able to catch ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross discussing fracking on WCBS-TV (channel 2) tonight between 5 and 6, and possibly between 6 and 6:30, and maybe even between 11 and 11:30. Also, if you haven t already, please like our Facebook page, Facts about Fracking.
Harm Reduction
The U.S. is backsliding when it comes to tobacco control, the American Lung Association says. The group has just issued its annual report card on how well the federal government, states and cities are doing on cessation efforts, giving many Ds and Fs.
The report card grades the various authorities on how well they are doing in preventing tobacco use, helping smokers quit and protecting the public from secondhand smoke.
"The EU s new tobacco policy statement, ostensibly designed to promote public health, will have the opposite effect: Far from reducing the toll of tobacco, millions will be condemned to ongoing addiction to smoking, half of whom will die as a direct result.
The World Health Organization predicts that if current trends continue, the likely toll of tobacco will amount to one billion lives cut short worldwide.
The European Union Health Commission is out with a new set of rules proposing more regulations on e-cigarettes and tightening the absurd ban on snus which ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross is doing his best to counter in the popular press.
Dr. Ross has had no less than three columns in various publications about the new directives. In Forbes, he wrote that the the new policy guidelines "barely tinker with lethal, addictive cigarettes while effectively banning products that have been shown to help smokers quit."
The World Health Organization predicts that if current trends continue, the likely toll of tobacco will amount to one-billion lives cut short worldwide. By tobacco, however, anyone with knowledge of the spectrum of tobacco-related disease knows it s the inhalation of cigarette smoke hundreds of thousands of times over decades that would be responsible if that catastrophic prediction comes to pass the relative harm of non-combustible tobacco and nicotine-delivery products is in the order of one percent that of smoking. Yet the new policy guidelines barely tinker with lethal, addictive cigarettes while effectively banning products that have been shown to help smokers quit.
H.I.V. positive patients who smoke lose more years to smoking than to the virus itself, a new Danish study suggests.
Researchers from Copenhagen University tracked nearly 3,000 Danish H.I.V. patients from 1995 to 2010, comparing them with a pool of 10,642 Danes of the same age and sex. They found that health complications resulting from smoking and not from H.I.V. itself are actually the biggest cause of death among HIV-positive individuals. Smoking was more closely linked to early death than was obesity, excess drinking or baseline HIV viral load a measure of how sick a patient was at diagnosis.
Yesterday, ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross presented ACSH s position on access to reduced-risk tobacco and nicotine products at the FDA s public meeting on nicotine replacement therapies and smoking-cessation products.
In his synopsis of the current sad state of affairs, Dr. Ross after discussing the counterproductive FDA approach to communicating risks called to account the public health authorities who have misled and continue to mislead smokers about the risks of various tobacco products. He states,
A new analysis of the Nurse s Health Study has quantified just how much smoking contributes to sudden cardiac death and how quitting can potentially reduce or eliminate that risk.
Cigarette smoking is a known risk factor for sudden cardiac death, but until now, we didn t know how the quantity and duration of smoking affected the risk among apparently healthy women, nor did we have long-term follow-up, said Roopinder K. Sandhu, M.D., M.P.H., the study s lead author and a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Although the legal age for purchasing tobacco products is 18, everyday more than 3,800 pre-teens and adolescents ages 12 to 17 smoke their first cigarette, among whom 1,000 go on to become addicted smokers. In response to these disturbing figures, researchers explored the effect of behavior-based interventions on preventing smoking initiation among young people who have not become regular smokers, as well as behavior-based interventions aimed at promoting cessation.
According to a new report from several public health organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society, in 2013 states will spend less than two percent of their annual tobacco tax and revenues from the Master Settlement Agreement to combat smoking. The report states that from the approximately 25.7 billion dollars states collected from the 1998 MSA, only 460 million dollars will go to smoking prevention and treatment programs.
Get ready to hear more about electronic cigarettes except about how they can possibly help people quit smoking. Some e-cig manufacturers are gearing up for an expensive ad campaign, the New York Times reports. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based NJoy Inc. is spending $12 to $14 million to promote its NJoy King, while Lorillard s BlueCigs has hired actor Stephen Dorff to promote their product. There have even been ads on cable stations, although no network has agreed to run the spots.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has just unveiled a new website, BeTobaccoFree.Gov, and as usual those in charge have chosen to keep on demonizing reduced risk tobacco products such as smokeless, and electronic cigarettes. E-Cigarettes may contain ingredients that are known to be toxic to humans. Because clinical studies about the safety of e-cigarettes have not been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), you have no way of knowing ¦ if they are safe [or] which chemicals they contain, the website says.