As public health delegates from around the world begin meeting in Seoul, South Korea, for a meeting to discuss revisions of the World Health Organization s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control treaty, a public policy expert is warning them against a dangerous group-think with regard to tobacco harm reduction.
Harm Reduction
The nation s smoking cessation programs just aren t working but health officials are stubbornly refusing to admit it.
Statistics released yesterday from the Centers for Disease Control show that 19 percent of U.S. adults smoked in 2011, a rate little changed from the 19.3 percent that did in 2010 and the 20.9 percent who puffed in 2005.
Smoking rates in our country went down fairly impressively, dating from the landmark Surgeon General s report in February 1964 which pinned lung cancer on smoking, up to 2005, but total smoking rates since then have basically stagnated, says ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross.
Sixty years after health reports started tallying the deadly toll of cigarettes, millions of people are still addicted to tobacco. Writing in Examiner.com, ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross uses the release of a Million Women Study in Britain to examine the damage women have sustained, and continue to sustain to their bodies, thanks to the scourge of addiction to cigarettes:
It s been 60 years since the first solid reports of the causal effects of cigarettes and premature death and disease made the news, and almost 50 since the Surgeon General s report made believers out of almost everyone: Cigarettes are killers.
University of California at Los Angeles chancellor Gene Block yesterday announced that the campus will go tobacco-free on April 22, 2013, which is Earth Day. Recommended by UCLA s Tobacco-Free Steering Committee, the ban will include all tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes and oral tobacco. UCLA Health Sciences had implemented a smoke-free policy last November, but now University of California President Mark Yudof has asked all UC campuses to follow suit by January 2014.
We've seen it before reports of reports of near-immediate reductions in heart attacks after smoking bans were enacted indoors. Now a new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine repeats the same errors of statistical analysis in an even more egregious manner.
The World Health Organization s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is scheduled to take up the issue of e-cigarettes at its meeting next month in Seoul and it appears as though the deck is stacked against advocates of tobacco harm reduction. This means more bad news for addicted smokers. A report by the convention secretariat to the countries attending basically urges them to ban e-cigarettes, saying they are products resembling cigarettes and could therefore undermine the denormalization of tobacco use ¦Parties may also wish to consider whether the sale, advertising, and even the use of electronic cigarettes can be considered as promoting tobacco use, either directly or indirectly.
Methadone has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV transmission in people who inject drugs, according to a study published in BMJ. The meta-analysis of several published and unpublished studies from nine countries concluded that making methadone available to injectible drug users reduced their HIV risk by 54 percent.
This may be the first and last time you ll hear us praise Vladimir Putin in the annals of Dispatch. But thanks to the Russian president, a personal fitness buff, the Kremlin seems poised to finally crack down on cigarette smoking.
Russia is the world s second-largest cigarette market, behind China, with nearly 40 percent of the country s 143 million people lighting up, including 60 percent of the male population. Russia s deadly habit causes an estimated 400,000 deaths annually, along with $48 billion in health costs and lost productivity.
There s also more evidence out this week about the dangers of cigarettes. A study of 28,000 men who started college at Harvard University between 1916 and 1950 found that smoking in one s teenage years is associated with a 29 percent increased risk of death, even though they quit later.
An Inhalation Toxicology study found that very few chemicals in very low concentrations were detected.
The Oklahoma Legislature is scheduled to have a committee hearing this Wednesday to discuss using tobacco harm reduction strategies as a means to reduce the health damage from cigarettes.
ACSH scientific advisor and author of our papers on harm reduction, Dr. Brad Rodu, professor of medicine and an endowed chair in tobacco harm reduction research at the University of Louisville, has written an op-ed encouraging Oklahoma legislators to promote tobacco harm reduction products, which have the potential to reduce the most preventable cause of premature death in the U.S: smoking. He writes: