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The Food and Drug Administration, bedeviled by a salmonella outbreak and tainted medicine from China, is likely to monitor imports and fresh produce more closely under an Obama administration.
With President Bush no longer a roadblock, health officials also can expect new powers to control tobacco, from cigarettes to the recently introduced smokeless products called snus.
President-elect Obama, a former smoker struggling to avoid relapse, is a sponsor of legislation giving the FDA authority to control, but not ban, tobacco and nicotine. . . .
Obama is being urged to move quickly to appoint an FDA commissioner. Already more than a half-dozen names are in circulation: outside critics such as Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Dr. Steven Nissen; insiders such as Susan Wood, a former director of the FDA's women's health office; and public health advocates such as Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Baltimore's health chief. . . .
Under the tobacco proposal, the agency would be able to order changes in tobacco products to make them less toxic and addictive, but could not ban tobacco or nicotine. The bill passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support, but a veto threat from Bush kept it from getting out of Congress.
Aides to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., co-author of the tobacco bill, say there is strong interest in getting the legislation passed soon after the new Congress convenes in January. Obama is a co-sponsor.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has fined a North Carolina company for violations at a Kauai facility.
Vector Tobacco, a subsidiary of Vector Tobacco Group of Durham, N.C., was fined $65,040 for allegedly misusing pesticides during application at its agricultural research facility in Kekaha on Kauai in 2005 and 2006, according to the EPA. On 93 occasions, the company failed to follow label directions intended to protect workers from exposure to pesticides.
"Employers of agricultural workers must ensure their employees are provided with information and protections that minimize the risk of potential exposure to pesticides . . .
The company also failed to prevent workers from entering areas where pesticides had recently been applied and then denied them prompt transportation to a medical facility after the workers reported adverse health effects due to the pesticide exposure, the EPA said.
The Hawaii Department of Agriculture discovered the violations during inspections in 2006 and began an investigation. The EPA said Vector Tobacco has shut down the Kekaha facility since the inspections.
handing off tobacco to the EPA makes about as much sense as its nearly completed pass to the Food and Drug Administration. A bill expected to be voted on soon would impose new restrictions on marketing, raise cigarette taxes, and police the ingredients in tobacco products, including nicotine levels. Any reckless FDA policy is bound to be popular . . .
it contradicts the premise of the federal government's case against Big Tobacco. Initiated by Janet Reno and continued by the Bush Administration, the federal suit argued that the industry committed fraud by falsely implying that light or low-tar cigarettes were healthier than standard smokes. Now Congress wants the FDA to mandate less nicotine and tar - the very practices it once claimed to find so odious.
In a final irony, the politicians backing this bill, especially sponsors Ted Kennedy and Henry Waxman, are the same ones demanding that the FDA crack down on "Big Pharma." They say it isn't doing enough to protect the public from risky but possibly beneficial new drugs. So: Lend the FDA imprimatur to an inherently dangerous product to fatten it up for taxation, while at the same time slow down or block the approval of life-saving therapies that treat disease instead of cause it. Congressional priorities are rarely so grotesque.
In a guest editorial on Jan. 26, Carson Taylor attacks "anti-smoking zealots" who rely on "junk science" to press for laws protecting the public from secondhand smoke. He doesn't identify these zealots, but I will. They include the surgeon general, EPA, Center for Disease Control, National Institute of Health, WHO and virtually every other public health organization on the planet.
Even Phillip Morris USA officially admits the risk. . . .
Now they indirectly fund outside groups such as "Citizens Against Government Interference" and "My Smokers' Rights," to do the dirty work for them.
Internal tobacco industry documents, made public by a lawsuit, reveal the strategy. "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA report. . . .
The Internet is full of sites claiming the moon landing was a hoax, Elvis is still alive and there is a conspiracy, hatched by public health officials around the world, to attack secondhand smoke with "junk science." As for me, I'm siding with the surgeon general
The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, siding with environmentalists in the court's first examination of the phenomenon of global warming.
The court ruled 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by improperly declining to regulate new-vehicle emissions standards to control the pollutants that scientists say contribute to global warming.
Lobbyist group Smoke-free Oldham scored a victory March 20 in its fight to pass a comprehensive smoking ban in Oldham County.
After a Smoke-Free Oldham volunteer contacted the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA officials removed a Web page from its Internet site that provided guidelines for a smoke-free room.
The EPA guidelines for maintaining a smoker's lounge are cited in a proposed amendment to the comprehensive smoking-ban ordinance that is currently before Oldham County Fiscal Court.
The guidelines come from a 1993 EPA document called, "Secondhand Smoke: What You Can Do as Parents, Decisionmakers and Building Occupants."
John Sutton, a Crestwood resident who contacted the EPA, said the agency's speedy removal of guidelines from the Web site shows that fiscal court should not pass the amendment.
"I would like the fiscal court to know they are looking at dated information," Sutton said at a press conference last Friday. . . . '
But Liz Burrows, project director for Smoke-Free Oldham, said she hopes the EPA's decision prompts magistrates to rethink the amendment.
"I just can't imagine that they would base an amendment on guidelines that the EPA no longer supports," she said.
Bob Axelrad, senior policy advisor for the indoor environments division of the EPA, wrote in an e-mail to Sutton that the agency must update the information, and that the information was never intended for use in legislation.
This 1995 narrative written by "Todd" (who is presumably Todd Haymore, a staffer for then-Congressman L.F. Payne, D-VA) chronicles a series of back room meetings between the White House and representatives from tobacco-growing states to broker a deal to stop the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's efforts to regulate nicotine a drug. The memo, a chronology of events apparently written to refresh Payne's memory, indicates that then-White House chief of Staff Leon Panetta engaged in secret negotiations with representatives of tobacco-growing states to "remove [FDA Commissioner] Kessler from the radar." Panetta dangled a proposal in front of tobacco companies, telling the representatives that "voluntary action" by tobacco companies on the youth access issue "may be the best way to stop Kessler from attempting to regulate tobacco products" :
"AFTER IT BECAME APPARENT THAT THE FDA/KESSLER SITUATION WAS THE GREATEST PROBLEM FACING TOBACCO STATE MEMBERS, IT WAS DECIDED THAT VOLUNTARY ACTION BY THE TOBACCO COMPANIES ON YOUTH ACCESS ISSUES MAYBE THE BEST WAY TO STOP KESSLER FROM ATTEMPTING TO REGULATE TOBACCO PRODUCTS.PANETTA SAID THAT IF THE INDUSTRY CAME FORTH WITH A VOLUNTARY PROPOSAL AIMED AT REDUCING YOUTH ACCESS, THE ADMINISTRATION WOULD REMOVE KESSLER/FDA FROM THE RADAR."
The memo also indicates White House attempts to keep the negotiations secret:
"Panetta stressed the need to keep this meeting and the comments within as quiet as possible. He said that if the meeting or discussions reached the press, the 'negotiations' would be off and the White House would deny knowing about them."
Congressman Thomas Bliley (R-VA) met with tobacco industry leaders and told them about the White House's youth access proposal. The industry put together a proposal and submitted it to Panetta. As a subsequent meeting, Panetta warned Congressmembers L.F. Payne (D-VA), Bliley (R-VA) and Charlie Rose (D-NC) "to keep this proposal and this meeting very quiet because media leaks would cancel any further discussions."
Ultimately, White House Counsel Abner Mikva reviewed the industry's proposal and made a counter proposal that the industry found unacceptable. There is no way to know the affect these negotiations may have had on tobacco companies ramping up of youth smoking prevention programs in the mid-1990s.
Was your health really endangered in the 45 minutes to an hour you spent in the non-smoking section of a Corpus Christi restaurant that was fully compliant with the smoking ordinance as it existed before the passage of the ban last January? Let's be realistic; how many of those 3,000 deaths attributed to cancer caused by secondhand smoke were people exposed to quantities that low? Even if you ate out several times a week, was there sufficient concentration to have any effect whatsoever on your lungs? The truth is, we don't know; Smoke Free Now does not know, and the EPA doesn't know. Extremist proponents of the ban have misquoted EPA . . . .
The position of the Coastal Bend Restaurant Association opposing the ban is based upon our sincere belief that there is not a significant danger, especially during the short time people may spend in a restaurant. We doubt that even a measurable amount of carcinogens may be found in such a non-smoking section. Make no mistake about it, there is no scientific study proving otherwise.
Smoking ban proponents have expressed a concern for our employees, for children who might sit in smoking sections, and for people seated immediately adjacent to smoking sections. In the spring of 2003, CBRA offered to support changes in the ordinance to require that restaurant managers offer servers the choice as to whether to work in smoking sections, and to allow minors in the smoking sections only with parents or guardians.
In June 2003, EPA published its first national Draft Report on the Environment(ROE) 2003, using available indicators and data to answer questions pertaining to national environmental and human health conditions. Two companion documents: one for technical readers (Draft Report on the Environment Technical Document), and another for readers with more general interest in the environment (Draft Report on the Environment Public Report) were released. Shortly after, EPA announced that it planned to release another Report on the Environment in 2006.
[Stan Glantz says: "As part of the new set of indicators for the Report on the Environment, the initial internal draft included both the indicator for SHS in the home and for cotinine in blood. A political decision was made to take out the indicator for children living in homes where someone smokes regularly, and leave in just the indicator for cotinine in the blood."]
PERHAPS I shouldn't have been surprised at my reception last week at a Lakewood, Ohio, hearing on banning smoking in restaurants and bars. Such events tend to bring out the penny-ante dictators. After all, when customers can readily find smoke-free facilities and nobody's forced to take a job, such bans are inherently authoritarian. But these people made Mussolini look like freedom's friend. . . .
Specifically, those behind the national jihad against so-called "passive smoking" insisted I must not speak. . . .
I informed the panel that the study that began the crusade, published in 1993 by the Environmental Protection Agency, had actually found no statistically significant link to lung cancer, requiring them to use a new standard for significance to get the "proper" results. . . .
And I told them that the largest of the passive smoking studies (35,000 participants) and longest (39 years) found no "causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (passive smoking) and tobacco-related mortality." . . .
So now you know why there was so much fuss and feathers over my impending testimony. It wasn't the Fumento they were afraid of; it was the facts.
Under its environmental protection measures, tobacco and hotel major ITC Ltd is planning to foray into carbon trading, a virtual trading of oxygen which is replenished by the company in the environment.
The company is also in talks with US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Indian Institute of Science (IIS) to facilitate its entry into carbon trading, ITC Paperboard Specialty and Paper Division (ITC PSPD) Chief Executive Officer Pradeep Dhobale told PTI from Bhadrachalam in Andhra Pradesh today.
A team from EPA, Lawrence Berkeley (US-based science and engineering research firm) and IIS has visited the company's Bhadrachalam unit last week to access ITC's contribution to replenish oxygen in the atmosphere, he said. . . .
A number of industries across the globe usurp oxygen from the atmosphere for its operations and churn out carbon-dioxide, which is a Green House Emission Gas (GHG).
All those of us who harbour such self-beliefs, whether we be writers or readers, will be most distressed to read a detailed academic study published in this month's American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study shows, without any doubt, that many of us were badly deluded in examining what might considered one of the primary public health topics of the past couple of decades the health consequences of exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke. The inevitable conclusion from the researchers' work, in fact, is that tobacco giant Philip Morris went to a huge amount of trouble to influence journalists to present the tobacco industry's viewpoint on the issue and met with remarkable success in return. . . .
The main focus of the study was of events that occurred in the U.S. But it doesn't take much reading between the lines to realize exactly the same sort of media manipulation was going on here in Canada. For instance, the study cited dozens of alleged "scientific experts" who were actually paid by the tobacco industry but were trotted out to the media as "independent" scientists who had "discovered" that secondhand smoke wasn't as bad as some would have you think.
Fraser Institute backed industry's paid expert'
One of those alleged "experts" frequently quoted was a former cancer researcher named Gio Gori. And who should turn up in British Columbia in 1999 but Gori, as co-author of a book attacking the EPA decision, entitled "Passive Smoke: The EPA's Betrayal of Science and Policy." The publisher was none other than the well-known right-wing think-tank, the Fraser Institute, which used its influence to get as much positive coverage as possible for the volume. The book was used as ammunition against a new bylaw which had just come into effect in Victoria to ban smoking in all indoor public places exactly the sort of legislation the tobacco industry had most feared. . . .
But back in 1993, the tobacco industry and Burson-Marsteller thought it was still worth a try to raise controversy surrounding the EPA findings. In its report back to Philip Morris, the PR firm suggested media strategies that would focus on "one-on-one opportunities with journalists and editorial writers rather than on the herd of daily journalists." These "opportunities," it suggested, would be "supplemented by carefully tailored, authored, placed pieces."
Conclusions. This is the first report, from the tobacco industry's own documents, to show the extent to which the tobacco industry has gone to influence the print media on the issue of the health effects of secondhand smoke. Unfortunately, what we report here is that even journalists can fall victim to well-orchestrated and presented public relations efforts regardless of their scientific validity. It is not clear how various professional media organizations oversee the ethical conduct of their members. Certainly, on the topic of the health effects of secondhand smoke, more scrutiny is warranted from these organizations for articles written by their members lest the public be misinformed and thus ill served.
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A study based on the tobacco industry's own documents shows the extent of the tobacco industry's efforts to influence the print media on the health effects of secondhand smoke.
This study was co-authored by Mayo Clinic researchers Richard Hurt, M.D., and Monique Muggli, along with Lee Becker, Ph.D., at the University of Georgia. It involved a review of previously secret internal tobacco company documents that revealed the tobacco industry launched an extensive, multifaceted effort to influence the scientific debate about the harmful effects of secondhand smoke.
The study purports that the tobacco industry attempted to derail public perception of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) risk assessment on secondhand smoke by recruiting a network of journalists to generate news articles supporting the industry's position and public relations messages about the secondhand smoke issue.
The authors also found that tobacco companies are attempting to influence journalists by financially supporting a U.S. school of journalism and planning to communicate their position through education programs targeting the media.
[I am] no longer shocked at the extensive reach of the tobacco industry and what it does, but I am quite surprised that parts of the institution we call journalism can be so swayed to purposely mislead their readers on such an important public health issue as secondhand smoke.Richard Hurt, M.D., co-author of a report on secret documents that revealed the tobacco industry launched an extensive, multifaceted effort to influence the scientific debate about the harmful effects of secondhand smoke.
Researchers sifting through thousands of pages of tobacco industry documents say they have unearthed evidence of tactics the industry used to try and derail a landmark government report that declared secondhand smoke to be a killer.
The report, the first comprehensive risk assessment of the health issue, determined secondhand smoke was a Group A carcinogen that caused about 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmokers. Although it was released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1992, it suffered under a cloud of doubt cast by a series of stalling strategies for a decade, say the authors of an article in the current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The report's findings were a key catalyst for the current widespread ban on indoor smoking, the "beginning of a major movement across the country and now across the world," said article co-author Dr. Richard D. Hurt, director of the Mayo Clinic's Nicotine Dependence Center. "This was about the bottom line for [tobacco companies."
But, he charged, "the delay cost people their lives."
Jennifer Golisch, a spokeswoman for Philip Morris USA, would not comment on the specific documents referenced in the article because she had not seen them. . . .
Although they mention RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co., the authors focus much of the article on one file found at the Minnesota Depository entitled "SCP Miles presentation." The reference is to Steve C. Parrish, vice president and general counsel of Philip Morris and Mike Miles, former chief executive officer of the company. And the presentation outlined various strategies related to the EPA document, the authors said. . . .
"This is just one segment of an enormous PR campaign," Hurt said. "People need to understand that a lot of rhetoric has been made up, fabricated by the tobacco industry. This clearly demonstrates the lengths to which this industry will go to fight something that is clearly in the interest of the public health."
This is just one segment of an enormous PR campaign. People need to understand that a lot of rhetoric has been made up, fabricated by the tobacco industry. This clearly demonstrates the lengths to which this industry will go to fight something that is clearly in the interest of the public health.Dr. Richard D. Hurt, co-author of the secret document report published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.