Email
Password
(Forgot Password?)
The fifth anniversary of the international treaty to address the global tobacco epidemic presents a significant opportunity for President Obama to continue his strong leadership on tobacco control by submitting the treaty to the Senate for ratification and urging its quick approval.
President Obama and Congress have already demonstrated clear and committed leadership on the tobacco problem by enacting the historic law giving the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products and marketing, and by raising cigarette taxes to finance health insurance for low-income children. Now, by ratifying the tobacco control treaty, the President and the Senate have the opportunity to lead in the global struggle against tobacco use
Jump to full article »
I was dismayed to read about the federal government being pressured to rescind the ban on flavoured tobacco by congressmen from Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia. . . .
Most people think tobacco-related diseases are primarily diseases of the elderly, but young people are also affected. One of my saddest memories was my last visit to a 38-year-old patient dying from lung cancer who was reading a pamphlet titled, How To Tell Your Young Children That You Are Dying. She had started smoking in junior high with friends and was unable to quit. Flavoured tobacco, not just the candy-flavoured types, but those blended to reduce the harshness of some tobaccos only have one purpose -- to hook young people.
Aim
To examine various methods to impute missing binary outcome from a web-based tobacco cessation intervention.
Design
The ChewFree randomized controlled trial used a two-arm design to compare tobacco abstinence at both the 3- and 6-month follow-up for participants randomized to either an enhanced web-based intervention condition or a basic information-only control condition. . . .
Conclusions
The choice of imputation model used to analyze missing binary outcome data can affect substantially the size and statistical significance of the treatment effect. Without additional information about the missing cases, they can overestimate the effect of treatment. Multiple imputation methods are recommended, especially those that permit a sensitivity analysis of their impact.
American governors not only need to hear that their No. 1 supplier of Canadian fossil fuels is not a climate change denier but that the Alberta government stands behind the science of climate change.
These days the science of climate change could do with all the help it can get.
It is being hammered by climate change deniers which would include some of the U.S. governors. . . .
I imagine they'll be looking back at us much as we look back at people from 200 years ago who thought cigarette smoking was good for you. Just 40 years ago, we had pro-cigarette organizations such as the Council for Tobacco Research that fought against the science linking smoking to cancer. In an internal memo dated 1972 -- called the Roper Proposal -- the industry acknowledged its goal was "creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it."
The tactics used by the cancer-deniers are remarkably similar to the climate-change deniers: creating doubt.
Their goal is to produce a public relations smokescreen that obscures facts and hides the truth -- and aids energy companies. And they are proving remarkably successful at it. . . .
The science of human-induced climate change is credible.
The counterspin by the deniers might create doubt, but it can't change the scientific facts that even the largest producer of fossil fuels in the country, Alberta, accepts: "The overwhelming evidence clearly indicates that climate change is real, that human-induced climate change is something that we need to address."
It is a message that Alberta's environment minister needs to repeat -- no matter where he finds himself -- to help drown out the yelling from the deniers.
U.S. Representative Ed Whitfield (KY-01) continued his efforts this week to shield Kentucky tobacco farmers from the consequences of a new Canadian initiative which would effectively result in a ban on U.S. burley tobacco. The Congressman spearheaded a letter, along with four other Kentucky Members of the House of Representatives, to the Prime Minister of Canada asking that their government stop encouraging other nations to implement similar laws which could have a devastating impact on tobacco farmers in the United States.
"A worldwide ban on burley tobacco imports would be a crippling blow to Kentucky tobacco farmers and wreak havoc in several rural economies throughout the Commonwealth," Whitfield said. "For the Canadian government to be advocating a reckless policy which endangers a critical Kentucky industry is simply unacceptable, especially considering they don't yet know the ramifications of their own new law. I join my Kentucky colleagues in calling on Health Canada to stop encouraging other nations to adopt similar policies and look for ways to revise their own law so that American tobacco growers are not unfairly hurt."
Whitfield, along with Congressman Hal Rogers (KY-05), Congressman Ben Chandler (KY-06), Congressman Geoff Davis (KY-04) and Congressman Brett Guthrie (KY-02) sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday asking that Health Canada, the Canadian health department, stop lobbying other nations to adopt a law similar to their own which has effectively resulted in a ban on American air-cured burley tobacco.
最近几年来，美国不断推出越来越严格的“禁烟规定”，当地的大小烟农们一度因此面临诸多困难。不过，现在随着科技的发展，人们意识到，原来经过人工基因改良的烟草竟然还能被用来充当房屋绝缘保温材料甚至是“生物燃料”。
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control is the lead American agency in an international tobacco monitoring effort called the Global Tobacco Surveillance System.
Partnering with the World Health Organization, the Canadian Public Health Association, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other groups, it works with nations in Africa and other regions to enhance their capacity to monitor tobacco use and guide national tobacco prevention and control programs aimed at protecting the public's health from the harmful effects of tobacco use.
While American companies play a major role in world tobacco markets, the United States government does not promote the sale or export of tobacco or tobacco products. Indeed, U.S. embassies are encouraged to actively assist and promote tobacco control efforts in their host countries.
At the same time, however, the U.S. opposes discriminatory tobacco-control efforts that target the products of some countries and not others. The overall objective is to ensure that U.S. companies have equal access to what it hopes will be a shrinking global market for tobacco.
The legal battle over the Cohiba name, a fight that has gone on longer than the Second World War, took on new life this week when Judge Robert W. Sweet of the Second District Court of New York ruled in favor of the Cuban cigar industry. The judge issued an injunction for General Cigar Co. to stop selling its Cohiba cigars in the United States and said that: "General Cigar selected Cohiba for a new product [in the early 1990s] in order to exploit the reputation and goodwill of the Cuban Cohiba" in the United States, and that General "continues to profit from the Cuban Cohiba's goodwill."
General intends to appeal. It has the right to continue to sell Dominican Cohiba cigars in the United States until the appeal is decided.
Ontario's "deprivation index" uses 10 benchmarks to measure poverty, among them such necessities of life as possession of a working toaster. So far, so good. Inexplicably, however, it omits a weekly carton of cigarettes. . . .
Pressed by high cigarette prices, the poor are more apt to swap their vegetable ration for a pack of smokes. And statistics also show that poor people who quit are most apt to put on weight, grow obese - and add diabetes to the myriad handicaps that make their lives difficult.
In a comprehensive 2004 report on the relationship between poverty and smoking, a team of World Bank scholars determined that material deprivation - measured as not having enough money for food or fuel - is everywhere associated with smoking. Poverty, in other words, is a reliable predictor of smoking.
The poorer the country, the more pervasive the habit. . . .
Tobacco taxes are poverty taxes. Fifty cartons of cigarettes a year, purchased in Ontario, costs around $3,750 - an onerous expense for a smoker whose income is, say, $15,000 a year. In the United States, smoking-rights crusader Michael J. McFadden has accurately defined tobacco taxes (in his book Dissecting AntiSmokers' Brains) as a tax "on the millions of people who live in the bottom quintile."
美国有着近４００年烟草种植历史的弗吉尼亚州将从１２月１日开始在餐馆和酒吧禁烟。至此，除华盛顿哥伦比亚特区外，美国有２８个州实施禁烟法。
A new study offers yet more proof that smoking is a major risk factor for death from heart disease and cancer.
Researchers followed 12,152 American and European male and female smokers, formers smokers and nonsmokers for three years. During that time, current smokers were 4.16 times more likely to die of cancer, 2.26 times more likely to die of heart disease and 2.58 times more likely to die from any cause than were former or nonsmokers. Current smokers were also more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke. . . .
"The analysis provides further strong evidence that people with heart disease who continue to smoke take a very high risk of increasing their chances of death in the short term," principal investigator Dr. Deepak L. Bhatt, chief of cardiology at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, said in a news release from the American Heart Association.
Aim To explore predictors of smoking relapse and how predictors vary according to duration of abstinence. . . .
Findings Relapse was associated with lower abstinence self-efficacy and a higher frequency of urges to smoke, but only after the first month or so of quitting. Both these measures mediated relationships between perceived benefits of smoking and relapse. Perceived costs of smoking and benefits of quitting were unrelated to relapse.
Conclusions Challenging perceived benefits of smoking may be an effective way to increase abstinence self-efficacy and reduce frequency of urges to smoke (particularly after the initial weeks of quitting), in order to reduce subsequent relapse risk.
Aims To describe the long-term natural history of a range of potential determinants of relapse from quitting smoking.
Design, setting and participants A survey of 2502 ex-smokers of varying lengths of time quit recruited as part of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States) across five annual waves of surveying. . . .
Findings Most theorized determinants of relapse changed over time in a manner theoretically associated with reduced risk of relapse, except most notably the belief that smoking controls weight, which strengthened. Change in these determinants changed at different rates: from a rapidly asymptoting log function to a less rapidly asymptoting square-root function.
Conclusions Variation in patterns of change across time suggests that the relative importance of each factor to maintaining abstinence may similarly vary.
The result was Bill C-32, officially titled The Cracking Down on Tobacco Marketing Aimed at Youth Act -- a misnomer if ever there was one. Today, a year later, what Mr. Harper's Conservatives have delivered instead is an over-the-top law that threatens a global trade war and another bonanza for Canada's already out-of-control contraband cigarette market.
The trade-war potential gathered momentum earlier this month when, according to Inside US Trade, the United States joined Argentina, Mexico, Switzerland, the European Union and other nations in opposition to Ottawa's new anti-bubble-gum tobacco law. At a meeting in Geneva, the nations said Canada's law would restrict trade in regular tobacco products to the benefit of Canadian tobacco producers.
The more immediate impact of the law, however, is a ban on the sale in Canada of virtually all brands of U.S. cigarettes. Guess where that leads? The logical result of a ban on legal imports of Marlboros and Winstons is new demand for illegal supplies through the burgeoning Native-dominated contraband market, a tax-evading multi-billion-dollar industry that already accounts for between 33% to 50% of the Canadian cigarette market. . . .
While this may look like another case of unintended consequences run amok, it more likely is part of deliberate scheming by Health Canada officials and others who are consciously using fruit-flavoured smokes to create a global tobacco trade bomb against the U.S. and tobacco industries in Europe, South America and Asia. . . .
Still, Bill C-32 became law, even though Senator Segal abstained over the trade issue. As a result, Mr. Harper's opportunistic election gimmick, aimed at curbing the use of flavoured tobacco to children, will do nothing to protect children. By further enhancing the power and scope of the contraband market, it will only increase the supply of illegal cigarettes, a prime source of tobacco to the young. At the same time, the government has launched a protectionist scheme that threatens a trade conflict.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) In their October briefing, ASH in the United Kingdom has released a favorable position on electronic cigarettes which is nearly 180 degrees to the position ASH in the United States has taken.
ASH's UK Position on E-cigarettes
"ASH supports a harm reduction approach to tobacco, that is, we recognize that whilst efforts to help people stop smoking should remain a priority, many people either do not wish to stop smoking or find it very hard to do so. For this group, we believe that products should be made available that deliver nicotine in a safe way, without the harmful components found in tobacco. Most of the diseases associated with smoking are caused by inhaling smoke which contains thousands of toxic chemicals. By contrast, nicotine is relatively safe. Therefore, e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine without the harmful toxins found in tobacco smoke, are likely to be a safer alternative to smoking. In addition, e-cigarettes reduce secondhand smoke exposure since they do not produce smoke."
Kyle Newton of eCigarettesChoice.com is elated at the release. "This is the second piece of good news for the E cigarette industry this week. The first was Governor Schwarzenegger's refusal to ban E cigarettes in California. It is a David vs. Goliath battle for us against organizations that are well-funded by companies who stand to lose a huge market share to the E cigarette."
On the other side of the big pond, ASH, USA has hammered the electronic cigarette industry unmercifully in its public claims against the product. But throughout this entire finger pointing, they have failed to produce any scientific research which tested the electronic cigarette and could trump the positive data "real" tobacco researchers have published.