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Massachusetts' Success in Helping Medicaid Recipients Quit Smoking Shows Why Congress Should Require Cessation Coverage in Health Reform 

Massachusetts today announced extraordinary results from its aggressive efforts to help Medicaid beneficiaries quit smoking by providing easy access to coverage for smoking cessation medication and counseling.

Massachusetts reported that smoking rates among beneficiaries in its MassHealth program plunged by 26 percent in the first two and a half years after the state began providing coverage of smoking cessation in July 2006. Costly medical procedures among those who utilized the cessation benefit also fell dramatically. Among benefit users, there were 38 percent fewer hospitalizations for heart attacks and 17 percent fewer emergency-room visits for asthma symptoms in the first year after using the benefit. There were 17 percent fewer claims for maternal birth complications since the benefit was implemented, state health officials reported.

Massachusetts is leading the way in demonstrating that health insurance coverage for smoking cessation quickly improves health and saves lives, and no doubt reduces health care costs as well.

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The Castro Tells the Grim Reaper to Butt Out!  

“BUTT OUT! Ending Tobacco Industry Exploitation of the LGBT Community” will mark the Gay American Smokeout by staging a public spectacle to draw attention to the impact of Big Tobacco on the LGBT community, on Nov. 19 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Harvey Milk Plaza. BUTT OUT!, a local LGBT advocacy group that works against the tobacco companies, and dozens of local concerned citizens dressed in black and wearing skull makeup to represent those who have died from tobacco, will chase out of the Castro the tobacco company’s proxy, the Grim Reaper, standing close to 10-feet tall while wielding a three-foot cigarette. State Senator Mark Leno, who has pledged to refuse campaign donations from tobacco companies, will be speaking at the event.

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Survey finds many smokers make last minute plans to quit 

Although a majority of smokers want to quit smoking, many delay making a plan to quit until the last minute, according to a recent American Cancer Society online survey of people who say they want to. Twenty-two percent of smokers surveyed planned to quit within 24 hours, while 30 percent said they planned to quit within a week or two. The American Cancer Society stresses the importance of planning ahead to quit smoking as research shows that preparing for quitting by allowing enough time to get nicotine replacement therapy, and planning how to deal with cravings and tempting situations, greatly increases the likelihood of succeeding. The Society encourages smokers to use the annual occasion of the Great American Smokeout® on November 19 as a date to make a plan to quit, or to plan in advance and quit smoking that day.

The survey, conducted via the Great American Smokeout Web site (www.cancer.org/GreatAmericans) also found that 76 percent of smokers surveyed did not know that they could receive free help

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Musicians, tobacco-free advocates band together for Great American Smokeout 

Tobacco-Free Living of Louisiana is teaming up with local musicians and businesses in downtown Alexandria to throw a block party as part of the Great American Smoke Out 2009 to help clear the air about secondhand smoke.

Region VI Tobacco Prevention and Cancer Control Coalition, Rapides Parish Healthy Initiatives Coalition and Louisiana Youth Prevention Services will partner to host "Live on Air" 6-10 p.m. Thursday on Desoto Street between Third and Fourth streets in downtown Alexandria to raise awareness -- and to have some fun while they're at it.

Tipitina's Music Co-op has partnered with the event to provide music by local artists -- including DC Sills, Dick Larry & Mick, Bombs Away, Gutta Boy Muzik and Dynamic Jake -- that will cover a wide range of musical tastes.

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City wants grant to battle smoking 

The American Cancer Society asks smokers to give up the habit for one day today as part of the Great American Smokeout.

A $2 million federal grant could help St. Joseph fight an anti-smoking battle of its own with longer lasting results.

The City Council gave the City of St. Joseph Health Department the green light Monday to apply for the Communities Putting Prevention to Work grant — part of the American Reinvestment & Recovery Act of 2009. If the funding is approved, the health department will work with Heartland Health, the Missouri Department of Health & Senior Services, Buchanan County, the St. Joseph School District, Missouri Western State University, the St. Joseph Youth Alliance and the University of Missouri to implement an anti-smoking marketing campaign, smoking cessation services and other programs.

City Health Director Debra Bradley provided statistics showing the severity of St. Joseph’s smoking problem among young people. According to a study from the health department and Heartland Health, 56 percent of local youths age 18 to 24 smoke, while roughly one in four adults are smokers.

Council member Mike Bozarth was the most vocal opponent of Monday’s resolution. As a smoker and opponent of expanded government regulations, Mr. Bozarth said he didn’t want the council to take part in a program that could restrict citizens’ personal choices.

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• Clearing air on cigarette ads  

There seem to be two Dr. Alan Blums.

One is a tweedy academic — the family medicine professor and director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama who has devoted his dead-serious career to the prevention of tobacco-induced illnesses.

The other is the self-described “Bart Simpson of the anti-smoking movement” — the alter ago who donned a fake pharmacist’s lab coat Wednesday to help set up “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” an exhibition on tobacco advertising that opens today in the Buffalo Museum of Science. . . .

The approach reflects a lesson learned in 1977 when Blum, then a Miami hospital intern and nascent anti-smoking crusader, lost a contentious radio talk show debate with a tobacco industry spokesman while the host, Larry King, blew smoke in Blum’s face.

Ever since, “I’ve tried to bring some humor and satire to a depressing issue that many people take very seriously,” Blum said. The strategy has included “house calls” to tobacco festivals and “anything else we could do to ridicule the brand names.”

Satirical references abound in “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” which was gleaned from a trove of tobacco advertising and promotional materials that Blum started collecting 15 years ago and now fills 2,500 boxes in his Alabama center.

He started by buying items distributed by cigarette companies that a Connecticut store owner had accumulated over two decades. “He must’ve thought it had collectible value, but it cost more to ship it [to Alabama] than I paid for it,” Blum said.

From the outset his goal was to mount an exhibition that underscored the everyday irony of seeing tobacco products on the shelves of pharmacies that dispense drugs prescribed to combat cancer, heart disease, hypertension and other diseases linked to smoking.

“I wanted to do an over-the-top, walk-through exhibit,” he said, citing the role that drugstores have played in keeping America smoking. “I’m not going after individual pharmacies as much as the chains that own them.” . . .

By touring “Your Cancer and Drug Store,” he said, “you are looking at origins of cancer just as much as you would by looking through a microscope.”

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I wanted to do an over-the-top, walk-through exhibit. I’m not going after individual pharmacies as much as the chains that own them.
Prof. Alan Blum, on his Buffalo, NY, ad exhibit that explores the role that drugstores have played in keeping America smoking.

Your Cancer and Drug Store: One-stop shopping: prescriptions, cigarettes, urgent care and chemo.
Alan Blum's mock-drug store: an exhibition on tobacco advertising that opens today in the Buffalo Museum of Science.

• Massachusetts' 'Model' Tobacco Cessation Benefit Spurs Unprecedented Drop in Smoking Rates, Heart Attacks, Asthma, and Birth Complications 

A "model" tobacco cessation benefit offered to Massachusetts' Medicaid participants has produced an astounding 26% drop in smoking rates in only two and a half years, and has already been linked to decreases in heart attacks, hospitalizations for asthma and COPD, and a significant decrease in birth complications.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program (MTCP) found that up to 38% fewer MassHealth cessation benefit users were hospitalized for heart attacks in the first year after using the benefit, and that 18% fewer benefit users visited the emergency room for asthma symptoms in the first year after using the benefit. Researchers also found that there were 12% fewer claims for adverse maternal birth complications since the benefit was implemented.

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services said more than 75,000 people -- a full 40% of MassHealth members who smoke -- have used the benefit to try to quit smoking. Cost savings are being studied, and all indications suggest they will be significant.

"It is clear from these latest findings that the Commonwealth's efforts to help people quit smoking is a sound investment," Executive Office of Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby said. . . .

"As the nation debates the future of its health care system, the national significance of this research cannot be understated," said Robert J. Gould, PhD, President and CEO of Partnership for Prevention, a national organization that advances policies and practices to prevent disease and improve the health of all Americans. "These findings demonstrate that prudent investments in preventive health today will have a dramatic and positive effect on our health care system tomorrow."

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• Ban On Cigarette Sponsorship For Sports To Stay 

The ban on cigarette sponsorship for sports activities, especially football, will not be withdrawn by the government, deputy minister of Youth and Sports Datuk Razali Ibrahim told the Dewan Rakyat Thursday.

Razali said there will be no change in the government's commitment to support the World Health Organisation's (WHO) global ban on cigarette companies sponsoring any kind of sports activities under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

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Cigarette adverts ban in shops will help save lives, says Cumbrian health boss 

Cumbria's public health chief believes a new law could prove a life-saver in the county.

Dr John Ashton has welcomed legislation aimed at protecting children and young people from the harmful effects of tobacco.

Tough new rules will stop cigarettes being advertised openly in shops - a move supporters hope will reduce the number of children taking up the habit.

Three people a week, on average, die every day from a smoking-related illness in Cumbria. And Dr Ashton, NHS Cumbria's director of public health, believes new rules will break the "depressing cycle" tobacco brings.

Peers in the House of Lords last week backed laws to remove cigarettes and tobacco from display at points of sale and to get rid of cigarette vending machines.

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EDITORIAL: Smoking: Unexpected cough | Jacksonville.com 

It's a small increase as increases go. Less than 1 percent.

But the news that cigarette smoking among adults went up at all for the first time since 1994 is cause for some alarm. . . .

Of course, there's no price tag that can be put on a decreased quality of life or the related miseries from smoking that smokers and their loved ones may have to endure.

The adult smoking rate has been declining, off and on, since the 1960s, The Associated Press reports. At one time, two of five adult Americans smoked.

But the latest number - even if just a blip on the big picture - shows that prevention programs shouldn't take any vacations.

It's a matter of life and death.

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Pennsylvania Department of Health Offers Resources to Help Smokers Quit During 

The Department of Health is offering support to help Pennsylvania smokers give up tobacco for good during the 34th annual Great American Smokeout on Nov. 19.

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just reported cigarette smoking among adults increased for the first time in 15 years. Approximately 46 million adults still smoke and about two million are Pennsylvanians," said Health Secretary Everette James. "While quitting can be difficult, we are asking smokers to use the Smokeout on Nov. 19 as an opportunity to take the first step toward a healthier lifestyle."

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Issues:`Growing number of students smoking' 

A survey has found about 13 percent of first-time smokers in the country are junior high school students. Muhammad Syahril Mansyur, from the Surakarta Health Agency's respiratory illness division, said Thursday the finding showed an alarming growth rate of Indonesian smokers. The agency conducted the survey in five major cities across the country, including Surakarta in Central Java. . . .

The Indonesian anti-tobacco campaign has reportedly been deemed as ineffective as the government refuses to sign the international convention on tobacco control

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• With aid, Mass. poor cut smoking  

Lower income Massachusetts smokers have dramatically abandoned their habit amid a major state campaign that vigorously promotes and pays for tobacco addiction treatment, according to a report scheduled to be released this morning.

Smoking rates among the poor plummeted 26 percent in the first two years of the ongoing state program, a striking result that is already drawing national attention to the effort. Officials targeted a population that historically had the highest smoking rates in Massachusetts.

The study, issued by the Department of Public Health, found early indications that the tobacco cessation efforts - aimed at patients enrolled in the state’s medical insurance for the poor, MassHealth - are reaping immediate health benefits.

Once patients began receiving counseling and medications to help snuff out their habits, they made fewer trips to emergency rooms because of wheezing bouts of asthma, and there was a trend toward fewer life-threatening heart attacks.

The stop-smoking initiative, which covers virtually all the costs of cessation counseling and drugs, was ordered by the Legislature as part of the landmark health care overhaul in 2006 with a dual purpose: saving lives and money. National health leaders plan to point to the Massachusetts experiment to bolster efforts to expand tobacco cessation services as part of federal health care legislation.

“These findings are extraordinary - they have major public health implications as Congress is debating health care reform,’’ said Matthew Myers . . .

The expectation, based on the experience of other states and health plans, was that 5 to 10 percent of MassHealth patients who smoked might seek help in the first couple of years, Keithly said.

Instead, from July 2006 to May of this year, about 75,000 patients had used the services - two of every five MassHealth smokers.

“We wondered if this population would be interested in cessation,’’ said Dr. Nancy Rigotti, director of the Tobacco Research and Treatment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It turns out they were interested - they just couldn’t afford it.’’

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Tobacco advertisements could be banned in Kyrgyzstan 

The Kyrgyz parliamentary committee on social policy has approved the government's proposal to fully ban tobacco advertisements in the mass media, the parliament press service told Interfax. Kyrgyz Health Minister Marat Mambetov told the committee that "a full ban on all forms of advertising in the mass media reduces the social attractiveness of smoking and reduces the consumption of tobacco products, especially among young people."

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Psychologists Welcome Tobacco Curbs In New Health Act 

The British Psychological Society welcomes the passage of measures protecting young people from harm caused by tobacco into law in the Health Act 2009.

The President of the Society, Sue Gardner, says: "We regard the protection of children and young people from smoking as an extremely high priority. All the available evidence suggests that the earlier young people start to smoke the more difficult they will find it to quit."

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