Follow Jeff All Weekend
We’d like to congratulate you for making it to the end of the first week of the New Year. 2010 promises to be as active as ever in the public health arena, but do not despair, for ACSH’s Jeff Stier will be there as always to make sense of it all on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JeffACSH.
Focus on Science, Not Industry
ACSH staffers would like to thank MD readers who wrote to Washington Post reporter David Eggen yesterday in response to his characterization of ACSH as “industry-friendly.”
“Mr. Eggen called me at about six last night and admitted that he referred to us as pro-industry because a lot of other people have done it,” says Stier. “I don’t think he wanted to attack us, he just want to characterize us. I think he’s starting to get the message that it’s an inaccurate characterization, though, not because of my conversation with him but because of the emails that so many of you, our dedicated donors and Morning Dispatch readers sent him.”
Focus on the Consumer, Not Industry
Yesterday, the Food and Drug Law Institute’s (FDLI) daily medical and scientific news briefing service included a short summary of the Wall Street Journal op-ed on drug (re)importation by ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross.
ACSH is grateful for the FDLI’s attention to this important subject. However, the title of their brief, “Commentary: Allowing imported drugs would hurt industry,” does not quite capture the focus of the article.
“From the ACSH perspective, the title should have been ‘Allowing imported drugs would hurt consumers,’” says ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. “It’s true that importing price controls will be damaging to our pharmaceutical industry, but that’s not the point of the op-ed. The point is that it would hurt U.S. consumers by stifling the innovation of new, life-saving drugs. It’s the consumers that ultimately suffer, and that’s the most important point.”
Regulating Pandora
An editorial in today’s New York Times took note of the same subtle character vice in the hit movie Avatar that caught the attention of our very own Dr. Gilbert Ross when he donned his 3D goggles.
“Sigourney Weaver’s character lights up a cigarette the first time she shows up onscreen,” says Dr. Ross. “She was supposedly playing a scientist living 150 years in the future, and yet she smokes. It’s an inverted anachronism. The question is: why would the movie include the completely superfluous depiction of cigarette smoking? It's so gratuitous I almost have to assume the cigarette industry was somehow responsible.”
The New York Times asks a different question when it comes to the debate about restricting the smoking imagery: “Stanton A. Glantz, the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco...is not urging government regulation but industry self-restraint and greater public awareness, like an R rating for smoking so families can go to the multiplex forewarned. Does that strike you as nannyish and make you a little queasy? Us, too.”
“Don’t get me started about what the nanny state is to the New York Times,” says Dr. Ross.
Costly Smog
Yesterday, as part of an effort to reduce smog, the EPA proposed reducing the maximum allowable concentration of ground-level ozone from 0.075 parts per million to 0.060 -- 0.070 ppm.
The New York Times reports, “The agency estimated that complying with the new standard would cost $19 billion to $90 billion a year by 2020, to be largely borne by manufacturers, oil refiners and utilities. But the agency said that those costs would be offset by the benefits to human health, which it valued at $13 billion to $100 billion a year in the same period.”
“They say the cost of this new regulation will be borne by manufacturers, oil refiners and utilities, but who consumes the products of these industries?” asks Stier. “We, the consumers do. Those costs will be passed along to us. And where did the EPA get an estimate of up to $100 billion in public health savings based on changing ozone levels by five parts per billion? We haven’t done a scientific analysis of the health effects of smog, but it’s hard to believe that $100 billion could be saved annually by eliminating all smog, let alone reducing concentrations by seven percent.”
Margarine of Error
As of the New Year, California restaurateurs can no longer serve food cooked in oils that contain trans fat.
“California is following the lead of New York and other states and banning trans fats,” says Dr. Whelan. “This is an example of what New York Times science writer John Tierney calls ‘cascading.’ An idea starts somewhere and gains momentum whether there’s science behind it or not.”
Curtis Porter is a research intern at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org).
