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I think it was around Christmastime last year, while frantically traipsing through the mall in search of bargains, that an over-eager kiosk salesperson stepped into my path. Wonderful, I thought. Another person trying to sell me overpriced hand cream. I tried to go around her, hoping she’d get the hint—to no avail. Oddly, instead of launching into a speech about my unhealthy cuticles, she asked me if I was a smoker.
And that’s when I noticed she was selling e-cigarettes: plastic cigarettes that look almost exactly like the real deal. (They even puff out odorless vapor that looks strikingly like cigarette smoke.) She explained to me that these can be a great tool for quitting smoking, because they look and feel like cigarettes. “It’s just like smoking, but without the nasty health effects.”
What a cool idea, I thought. My father, a former (heavy) smoker, told me once that quitting smoking was a total nightmare for him. Why? Because he didn’t just crave the nicotine in the cigarettes; he craved the whole smoking ritual: taking that first puff of the day while sipping his coffee, taking breaks at work and chatting with his friends, etc, etc. Quitting smoking wasn’t just about omitting nicotine from his life; it was about changing his lifestyle.
From that perspective, e-cigarettes seem like a good way to ease the transition from smoker to non-smoker. They look like cigarettes, taste like cigarettes, and feel like cigarettes but the “smoker” is no longer exposed to 40+ human carcinogens multiple times a day. On top of that, e-cigarettes don’t produce that thick, noxious cloud of smoke that clings to your hair, skin, and clothing, and makes everyone around you cough. “I feel like this could save my life,” said one satisfied customer, who reported cutting her smoking from 3 packs a day to 1 ½ packs a day.(1)
But Katie Zezima of the New York Times astutely points out the dark side of these products—namely, that we don’t really know anything about how safe they are. Read the rest of this entry »
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
DemFromCT continues his public health series over at DailyKos, thus also continuing to make my early week blogging easier. This week is a brief look at this year’s flu season, already in full swing, including what is happening in pediatric deaths from flu. He follows this with another interview, this time the American Lung Association’s Director, National Advocacy, Erika Sward. Topics are timely: SCHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance bill, just signed into law) and tobacco control.
This post is part of a “global health blog carnival” effort that Christine Gorman at Global Health Report has just launched. The theme for today’s posts is “prevention vs. treatment” – visit this post for links all participating posts.
Although my post focuses largely on the U.S. experience, it’s an example of a universal difficulty in justifying and funding prevention programs.
Maggie Mahar and Niko Karvounis have posted some disturbing news at their Health Beat blog: The war against tobacco is slowing down. Many strategies that have helped lower the U.S. smoking rate to under 20% (counseling, quit lines, cessation clinics, and medications) simply can’t compete with other spending needs:
American News Project has just posted a new video segment about how tactics used to defend tobacco are now staving off action on climate change. In “Smoke and CO2: How to Spin Global Warming,” Danielle Ivory gives an eight-minute overview of how we went from reassurances that tobacco isn’t really harmful to insistence that we don’t really need to worry about global warming. Our own David Michaels provides commentary.
Even if you already know all about how manufactured doubt has stalled progress on smoking cessation and greenhouse-gas reductions, it’s worth watching the piece for its collection of ads and speeches by those trying to prevent regulation of their products. My favorite: former Philip Morris CEO Joseph Cullman, when asked about smoking’s link to low-birthweight babies, saying “some women prefer having smaller babies.”
By David Egilman
Jack Kevorkian was tried several times for second degree murder for assisting at suicide. He was finally convicted of second degree murder for one such “assist.” The state never asserted that the person who was killed was uninformed or had not participated in the decision to hire Kevorkian to assist in their own death. Patients knew of the risk they were taking when they contacted Dr. Kevorkian to help them kill themselves.
By Liz Borkowski
An article in the latest issue of OMB Watch’s Watcher newsletter reports on U.S. Chamber of Commerce efforts to get EPA to make changes to its chemical databases. The short story is that the Chamber asked the EPA to correct what it claimed was “inconsistent and erroneous” information about chemicals in the agency’s databases, and EPA rejected the claim, explaining that there were “valid and specific reasons” why databases might contain differing information for the same chemicals. (See the article for the complete story.)
The important thing about this story is that the Chamber made its request in the form of a Data Quality Act challenge. The DQA (officially the Information Quality Act, or IQA) has what sounds like a reasonable goal: “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” disseminated by federal agencies. Its history to date, however, shows it to be a tool for hindering agencies’ work to protect public health and the environment.
Four Nigerian states are suing British American Tobacco and Philip Morris to recover costs of treating smoking-related diseases. The plaintiffs charge that the companies aimed to recruit more smokers by targeting minors, using sponsorship of concerts and sporting events and free cigarette giveaways. Tosin Sulaiman in The Times (UK) reports:
Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking’s health risks.
Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so the Center for Media and Democracy has launched a TobaccoWiki that will allow people interested in the subject to share their findings online. (A Wiki is basically a tool for online collaboration; see Wikipedia’s explanation to learn more about it.) Here’s their explanation of the project:
By David Michaels
Chris Cillizza of WashingtonPost.com’s The Fix blog reports that former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is “growing more and more serious about a run for president” – in fact, he’s chosen a “campaign manager in waiting.”
Tom Collamore, a former vice president of public affairs at Altria, has been leading the behind-the scenes organization efforts for a Thompson presidential candidacy and will be intimately involved when (not if) the former senator decides to announce a bid.
Altria is the parent company of Philip Morris (PM), which was behind many of the tobacco industry’s creative methods for staving off and weakening government regulation of tobacco products. How much did Collamore participate in these activities?
Collamore joined Philip Morris in 1992, Cillizza reports. At that time, the tobacco industry was concerned about moves to ban smoking in public places based on the health risks associated with secondhand smoke, or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). Tobacco’s number one enemy was the EPA, which had conducted a risk assessment that concluded that ETS was causing disease and death among non-smokers. Big Tobacco realized that as long as the harm from tobacco was limited to smokers, the cigarette makers could avoid regulation by claiming that smoking (and related illness) was just a personal choice issue. But once it became clear that smoking kills non-smokers too, all bets were off.
A 2004 article in Preventive Medicine by Monique Muggli, Richard Hurt, and Lee Becker uncovered Philip Morris’s work to “derail the [EPA’s] risk assessment on environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) by recruiting a network of journalists to generate news articles supporting the industry’s position and pushing its public relations message regarding the ETS issue.” Collamore was apparently involved in this effort: Read the rest of this entry »
Today, the Institute of Medicine released its report Ending the Tobacco Problem: A Blueprint for the Nation. In a public briefing Richard J. Bonnie, Chair of the IOM Committee on Reducing Tobacco Use, explained that “ending the tobacco problem” means reducing tobacco use “so substantially that it is no longer a significant public health problem.”
In the U.S., tobacco use claims an estimated 440,000 lives and rings up an estimated $89 billion in health care costs every year. Worldwide, it’s responsible for five million deaths each year, making it the second major cause of death.
The reduction in U.S. smoking – tobacco use has declined by more than 50% since 1964 – is a major public health achievement, but Bonnie noted that there are still 45 million smokers and that smoking initiation rates in young adults appear to be rising. To preserve and enhance gains already made, the committee recommends strengthening existing tobacco control measures “such as excise tax increases, indoor smoking restrictions, comprehensive state-based programs, media-based prevention campaigns, school-based programs, and cessation therapies and services.” To truly end the tobacco problem, though, Bonnie explained that stronger tools are needed:
