Yesterday marked another victory for e-cigarette manufacturer NJOY after a federal appellate court in Washington, D.C. unanimously upheld a lower court’s previous injunction against the FDA’s attempt to regulate the products as drugs or medical devices. The appeals court said that the e-cigarettes should instead be regulated under the less stringent 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which allows the FDA to control tobacco products’ packaging and marketing.
Harm Reduction
Now for some more good news on the harm reduction front: While cigarette sales have fallen by 17 percent since 2005 due to robust health campaigns and steeper taxes, smokeless tobacco products sales have grown by an annual rate of approximately 7 percent, reports The Chicago Tribune. The increase in sales of smokeless tobacco products can be partially attributed to their invisibility. For addicted smokers stuck in a smoke-free office environment all day long, these products relieve them of their nicotine craving.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside may as well tell smokers looking to switch to e-cigarettes to keep smoking regular cigarettes based on their study claiming that current versions of the cigarette alternative present a range of issues that pose possible public health risks.
Another study in Human Reproduction, which examined 13,815 Danish women, reported that women who smoked for part or all of their pregnancy bore daughters began menstruating at a slightly younger age than the daughters of non-smokers.Menarche is the age at which a girl has her first period. Early menarche has been linked to higher rates of heart disease and breast cancer, among other health risks.
If there weren’t already enough reasons for cigarette smokers to quit, more incentive just appeared in the form of a longitudinal study published in the December issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism. The report demonstrated that Blacks who smoke face a dramatically increased likelihood of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Further, the more smokers light up, the greater the risk. Heavy, long-term smoking increases the chances of developing RA by 2.37 times on average.
Secondhand smoke supposedly contributed to one percent of the worldwide mortality rate during the course of 2004, according to a study published in last week’s The Lancet. Using disease-specific relative risk estimates and other approximations, the study came up with a figure for the rate of secondhand smoke-related exposures and their effects among children and adult non-smokers from 192 countries in the year 2004.
My mother smoked while she was pregnant with my sister and me. I used to light her cigarettes while she was driving. One time I handed her a lit Benson & Hedges backwards, burning her lip and nearly causing a huge freeway accident. Swerving wildly, she managed to avoid the car in front of her — and quickly grabbed for the cigarette, which had flown out of her hand. Puffing rapidly, she got the cherry back up to a glow, and a look of calm passed over her face as she blew out her first inhale.
While today marks the 33rd annual Great American Smokeout, put away your firewood because this isn’t a call for a national bonfire, as the name might mistakenly imply, but is instead an event sponsored by the American Cancer Society that encourages smokers to drop the habit for 24 hours. By urging smokers to not puff on a cigarette for a whole day, the ACS hopes that this may be just the right kind of motivation to get them to quit permanently. The yearly event first began in 1977, and the percentage of adult smokers in the U.S. dropped from 34 to 21 percent from 1978 to 2005. That rate, however, has not budged since, and 46.6 million U.S.
Tobacco companies such as Philip Morris International (PMI), spun off from Altria Group Inc. in 2008 to expand the company s foreign market share and evade American regulation and litigation, have assumed the role of big, bad bully on the foreign block. The companies and others like it are using expensive lobbying campaigns and lawsuits to prevent ad restrictions, larger health warnings and higher cigarette taxes from being enacted in countries like Brazil, the Philippines and Mexico.
ACSH friend Bill Godshall of Smokefree Pennsylvania supplies some needed background to yesterday’s Dispatchitem about graphic labels on cigarette packs. Commenting on the Department of Health and Human Services’ proposal to mandate scary images on cigarette packs, Dr. Whelan said in yesterday’s Dispatch that “to my knowledge there is no evidence that these images deter addicted smokers.”
But Godshall says:
Most of us may already know that smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing an average of 440,000 people annually. But not all of us know that women who smoke or used to smoke regularly are at a greater risk of dying from breast cancer. Those statistics come from a large prospective cohort study conducted by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and presented at the Ninth Annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference.