Smoking Kills a Half Million People Every Year, BUT...
Researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Science studied over 300,000 men and women for ten years and concluded that smoking helps prevent Parkinson’s disease.
“This is nothing new,” says ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. “There have been studies for years showing that people who smoke a lot have a reduced risk of Parkinson’s. Obviously this doesn’t mean you should smoke since most lifetime smokers would be long dead before they could reap the benefits of this. But this could help scientists learn more about the etiology and treatment of this disease.”
“Nobody knows why this effect might occur,” says ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross, “but there is a pronounced dose response, so it seems to be real. This is an observational and not an interventional control study, but it’s still a very large study that confirms previous studies, so we have to pay attention to these numbers.”
This Just In: Soda Is to Blame for Everything
A study to be presented Friday during the American Heart Association’s Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention annual conference suggests that soda consumption is to blame for 130,000 new cases of diabetes and 14,000 new cases of heart disease over the last decade.
“Once you’ve decided on a villain you can blame everything on it,” says Dr. Whelan. “While it’s true that excessive calories and weight gain are highly correlated with diabetes, you get those calories from all food sources, not just soda.”
“This study is based on a computer model that uses the researchers’ assumptions,” says Dr. Ross. “This is worse than data-dredging because in data-dredging you’re at least using data you’ve gathered in studies before searching for whatever statistically significant correlations you can find. Here they’re just making these numbers up.”
Brazilian President Goes Cold Turkey
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva claims to have given up his fifty-year smoking habit after a recent health scare. So far he has gone cold-turkey for forty days, and he says he feels good.
“This gentleman is sixty-four years old and has been smoking for fifty years, so you can do the math on that,” says Dr. Whelan. “It’s a good example of the fact that it’s never too late to quit, but after fifty years there are definitely some irreversible effects.”
Dr. Ross adds, “We would like to offer praise and support for President Lula, but we warn him that quitting for forty days is not the end of the story. A good percentage of smokers can quit for forty days, but eventually the powerful attraction of nicotine addiction shows up again.”
FDA Prioritizes Safety
According to the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Peggy Hamburg told Congress Tuesday that she isn’t yet ready to support allowing prescription drugs to be re-imported from abroad because she fears it could create a slew of safety problems.”
“The FDA has basically been the bulwark against the politically motivated campaign to allow lower-priced imported drugs into our pharmacies,” explains Dr. Ross, who wrote for the Journal about drug re-importation. “The FDA has always maintained since these programs were first proposed that they cannot guarantee the safety of such imported drugs and thus they will not permit it. Not only would re-importation compromise safety, but it would barely affect drug prices and would certainly hurt our pharmaceutical industry by importing foreign price controls.”
Vaccines Under Fire
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company Wyeth (now a subsidiary of Pfizer) filed by the parents of a developmentally disabled girl who claim that her condition was caused by Wyeth’s diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine.
“Vaccines are very different from other drugs in the sense that pharmaceutical companies will simply stop making them if there is too much liability,” says Dr. Whelan.
Dr. Ross adds, “In the 1980s there was an avalanche of lawsuits against vaccine-makers for a variety of complaints, most of which had nothing to do with the vaccines. By the time the law protecting vaccines was passed in 1986, there were only four manufacturers making vaccines for our population. In this case, the litigants are trying to bypass the 1986 law that gave presumptive immunity to vaccine makers, shifting the compensation decision to a no-fault type of hearing. Even Wyeth joined in this petition to the Supreme Court to hear the appeal to clarify uncertainties in the law.”
Curtis Porter is a research intern at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org).
