http://www.tobacco.org/newsfeed/org/iarc.rss Latest top tobacco news headlines en-us http://www.iarc.fr/ENG/Press_Releases/pr189a.html http://tobacco.org/news/268211.html Smoke-free policies reduce the exposure of both adults and children, reduce the prevalence of smoking in adults and reduce the risk of heart disease related to smoke exposure. A resulting reduction in the lung cancer burden may well occur as a result of these policies, but relevant evidence will only become available some time in the future. Further, such policies do not negatively affect the restaurant and bar industry. These findings are the latest in a series of reviews and evaluations conducted by an international group of experts convened at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), in Lyon, France. A summary of their conclusions will be published exclusively online and in the July edition of The Lancet Oncology (TLO). International Agency for Research on Cancer Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSL291392620080630 http://tobacco.org/news/268183.html Smoking bans are an effective way of preventing heart disease, getting cigarette users to quit and protecting children from second-hand smoke, a World Health Organization (WHO) report issued on Monday said. The report by scientists at the WHO's International Agency for Cancer Research urged more countries to adopt smoking bans in public and at the workplace, saying there was enough evidence to prove they work, without hurting businesses such as restaurants and bars. Reuters Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=125&art_id=vn20080702055547321C755911 http://tobacco.org/news/268181.html Smoke-free policies are reducing heart disease related to smoke exposure, the prevalence of smoking in adults and the exposure of both adults and children to second-hand smoke. These and other findings are published in a special report of this month's the Lancet Oncology. The report, by the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), also showed that smoke-free policies do not decrease the business activity of the restaurant and bar industry. The Independent Online South Africa Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jOD7uWp-g2u2UxdzxcM1g4nMWHQQ http://tobacco.org/news/267953.html Oral and nasal snuff and chewing tobacco increase the risk of certain types of cancer but are probably safer than smoking, according to a review published on Wednesday in the journal Lancet Oncology. The risk of throat and pancreatic cancer is roughly 60 percent higher among users of smokeless tobacco products compared with non-users, it found. Investigators in the United States and Asia also found a 260 percent increase in the risk of mouth cancer among smokeless tobacco users, compared with non-users, but a similar European investigation found no added risk, it said. Agence France Presse Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://www.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=617010 http://tobacco.org/news/267951.html Smoke-free policies are extremely effective at reducing smoking rates, exposure to secondhand smoke, and even smoking-related heart disease, new research shows. The report, by an International Agency for Cancer Research working group, also found smoke-free rules don't affect business in restaurants or bars. HealthDay [HealthScout] editors@healthday.com Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/l-spa062708.php http://tobacco.org/news/267937.html Smoke-free policies are reducing heart disease related to smoke exposure, the prevalence of smoking in adults and the exposure of both adults and children to second-hand smoke. Further, such policies do not decrease the business activity of the restaurant and bar industry. A reduction in the lung cancer burden is plausible but relevant evidence will only become available in the future. The findings appear in the latest of a series of Special Reports from the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), published exclusively Online and in the July edition of The Lancet Oncology. The issue is dedicated to lung cancer and will be presented at the International Lung Cancer Conference, Liverpool, UK, from 9-12 July. . . . The group found sufficient evidence for the following: that implementation of smoke-free policies substantially decreases second-hand smoke exposure; that smoke-free workplaces decrease cigarette consumption in continuing smokers; that smoke-free policies do not decrease the business activity of the restaurant and bar industry; that introduction of smoke-free policies decreases respiratory symptoms in workers; that voluntary smoke-free home policies decrease children's second hand smoke-exposure; and that smoke-free home policies decrease adult smoking. Strong evidence was found that smoke-free workplaces decrease the prevalence of adult smoking; that smoke-free policies decrease tobacco use in youths; that the introduction of smoke-free legislation decreases heart disease morbidity; and that smoke-free home policies decrease smoking in youths. But, because the lead time for lung cancer to be diagnosed after exposure to a carcinogen such as cigarette smoke can be 20 or more years, the group concluded that "data are not yet available regarding the expected decline in lung cancer after implementation of smoke-free policies." On the basis of the evidence reviewed, the Working Group recommend that governments enact and implement smoke-free policies that conform to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). EurekAlert jppierce@ucsd.edu UK Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://www.policyalternatives.ca/documents/National_Office_Pubs/2005/curing_the_addiction_summary.pdf http://tobacco.org/news/226766.html The year was 1987, and the Minister of National Health and Welfare, the Honourable Jake Epp, had recently introduced the draft Tobacco Products Control Act as Bill C-51 in the House of Commons. I was the civil servant responsible for the tobacco legislation file. Very quickly, it became clear that we had a tiger by the tail. The tobacco industry pulled out all the stops to defeat or weaken the government’s proposal to ban tobacco advertising. Members of Parliament were assaulted with blizzards of letters arriving, seemingly from ordinary citizens protesting the new law. There were various texts, fonts, styles and paper stocks. It seemed like a genuine grassroots protest. In reality, it was an early example of fake write-in grassroots campaign organized by a corporation in its own private interest — a “grasstops” campaign. The tobacco industry hired high-profile lobbyists; they created fake coalitions of influential citizens (“Coalition 51”); and they bombarded us with reports they arranged to have sent to us from all over the world, from organizations like the Children’s Research Unit, the Smokers’ Freedom Society, INFOTAB, the World Federation of Advertising, and Freedom of the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST). These and other petitioners they sent our way were all financed by the tobacco industry. . . . . It was Sunday, March 8, 1998 and I was at home in Ferney-Voltaire, France, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland where I worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in charge of the Tobacco or Health Program. The telephone was ringing non-stop. Journalists and colleagues were calling me at home from all over the world, demanding an explanation of the story on page one of that day’s London Sunday Telegraph. The story began, “The world’s leading health organization [WHO] has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.” . . . Later, Elisa Ong and Stanton Glantz at the University of California researched the circumstances surrounding this event, and discovered that the tobacco industry had been tracking the IARC study since 1993, and spent far more in tracking the study and in planning and executing their masterful disinformation campaign than IARC spent to do the study. Ong and Glantz’s careful research was published in the respected medical journal The Lancet in April 2000, but received scarcely any media attention. Two years after the fact, the story was “old news.” Tobacco industry misinformation, fanned by a well-oiled public relations machine, operating everywhere in the world, had trumped careful scientific work by well-meaning health professionals working for IARC, WHO and the University of California. To this day, tobacco industry apologists continue to cite the March 8, 1998 edition of the London Sunday Telegraph as “proof” that passive smoking does not cause lung cancer. These are just two examples of many similar experiences I have had in nearly a quarter-century of full-time work on tobacco control. Now, finally, I am no longer lost in the trees; I can clearly see the forest. What the tobacco industry was doing to the Canadian government in 1987 and 1988, and to the World Health Organization in 1998 was exactly what it was programmed to do. Tobacco companies are obliged by laws governing corporations to make money for their shareholders. They can only do this by selling more and more cigarettes. So Big Tobacco will never stop beating up on public health policies and public health agencies. After all, their actions threaten cigarette sales, the only route to shareholder profit for tobacco companies. But the monstrous tragedy of this logic is that the more cigarettes they sell, the more their customers will get sick and die. As long as we continue to allow tobacco companies to exist as forprofit business enterprises, every attempt we make to curb tobacco industry behaviour in the name of public health improvement control will be met by unceasing tobacco company efforts to defeat, attenuate, mitigate, delay, counter or confuse the new knowledge or new policy measures that tobacco companies think might cut into their sales. We will never succeed in completely phasing out tobacco consumption until we remove profit-making from the tobacco business. This book clearly spells out just why this must be done and proposes a variety of workable ways that it could be done. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Canada Mon, 26 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20060414&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=604140438&SectionCat=NEWSREWIND&Template=printart http://tobacco.org/news/221884.html I am becoming more and more concerned about our loss of freedom and liberty in Massachusetts. The latest is the activist Supreme Judicial Court ruling that private clubs cannot decide to allow smoking in their own buildings (the key word here being private). Why did the SJC think the Legislature included a provision for private clubs in its 2004 workplace smoking ban? . . . The fact is, there has never been a scientific study that proved that secondhand smoke causes cancer. That’s right, not a one. The EPA put out a flawed study in 1993 which was thrown out by a federal court in 1998 because it manipulated data and ignored scientific standards. The only other study was by the World Health Organization, also in 1998, which stated that there was no statistically significant association between secondhand smoke and cancer. . . . I guess you don’t need factual evidence to win a case in Massachusetts. All you need to be is politically correct in these kangaroo courts. Worcester Telegram & Gazette Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:00:00 GMT http://skepdic.com/news/newsletter41.html http://tobacco.org/news/221667.html The EPA's data show no significant link between passive smoke and lung cancer. This is true only if you accept the tobacco industry's claim that an epidemiological study should demonstrate an increased risk of 100 percent to be significant. Even after lowering the standard from p=0.05 to p=0.1 (i.e., from a one in twenty to a one in ten chance of a spurious correlation), they were still able to get a relative risk of only 1.19. This number is significant according to epidemiologists Jonathan M. Samet and Thomas A. Burke of Johns Hopkins university. According to John Brignell, "risk ratios of greater than 3 are normally considered significant. One might even stretch a point and go down to 2, but never lower" (Sorry Wrong Number, p. 129). John is pushing for a standard even the tobacco industry might marvel at. The standard of a risk ratio of 2 or higher was pushed for the tobacco industry by Jim Tozzi, the force behind the data quality act, an act aimed at promoting the republican plan for the deregulation of America. If the tobacco industry had its way, it would be impossible to ban just about any environmental toxin, not just secondhand smoke. (see Chris Mooney's The Republican War On Science). . . . It may not be statistically significant but it does not support the claim that the WHO study contradicts its own conclusions, nor does it support the claim that the study indicates no association between passive smoke and risk of lung cancer. [The results could be "consistent with risks considerably higher than generally accepted - the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval is a relative risk of 1.44 - whereas the generally accepted range is 1.1 to 1.3."* To see to what lengths the tobacco lobby and their frontmen will go to in their effort at discrediting studies, see this article from Lancet.] The Skeptic's Dictionary Wed, 05 May 2004 04:00:00 GMT http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/02fal/iarc.asp http://tobacco.org/news/216117.html Is industry becoming an inside player at the world's leading research center on carcinogens? n 1993, an officer of the Philip Morris corporation wrote a memo that laid out, in elaborate detail, a plan to influence a prestigious cancer research center. IARC -- the International Agency for Research on Cancer -- had undertaken a study on the health effects of secondhand smoke, and the memo prescribed ways to get the study delayed, diluted, or shelved. But there was a problem: IARC's reputation was extremely solid. "Our scientists go as far as to state that IARC is virtually unassailable," the author noted gloomily. Today, according to some scientists, that reputation is no longer so strong. These critics charge that IARC, an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), has begun inviting the input of scientists with direct and indirect financial links to the very industries that stand to lose or gain enormously from its findings. IARC has long been considered the premier research center for identifying carcinogens, and such a decision could undermine its credibility and, potentially, its science. The critics include two former top officials of IARC itself. Natural Resources Defense Council Sun, 01 Sep 2002 04:00:00 GMT http://www.caller.com/ccct/letters_to_the_editor/article/0,1641,CCCT_841_4019174,00.html http://tobacco.org/news/205772.html The prime issue is what effect second-hand smoke (EFTS) has, if any. A secondary, but just as important issue, is the commercial and property rights of business owners. The health issue is the easiest. The science seems to get the results that their sponsors desire, ethics be damned, except for a certain study by the World Health Organization in 1998 that showed no ill effects from exposure to ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke). In fact, the study showed a modest benefit in reduced rate (minor) in lung cancer in those exposed. Obviously, this study is ignored by the anti-smokers. There are as many pros as cons on the subject. Suffice it to say the issue is not resolved and those who say it is are expressing their beliefs, not facts. Corpus Christi Caller-Times Sun, 21 Aug 2005 04:00:00 GMT http://www.kaleo.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/13/425cc60d4982e http://tobacco.org/news/194813.html The war on smokers' rights by the anti-tobacco lobby does not, contrary to popular opinion, go unopposed. There are many ways that public activists and freedom-minded individuals can punch holes through anti-smoking arguments. . . . "Second-hand smoke kills 65,000 people every year!" they claim. Last time it was 30,000. It's funny how drastically higher their statistics seem to get. With all the propaganda and "junk science" out there, it's no wonder most people go along with the anti-tobacco lobby's claims. But let's look at some facts here. . . . The WHO has most certainly done some unbiased research on the effects of second-hand smoke. You, the average layman, however, will never see them. Why? Because it doesn't fit with the anti-smoking fanatics agenda of gaining control over your personal habits. . . . You can, in fact, read the study itself at FORCES.org if you wish to decide for yourself. After a long round of legal battles in which the UK Press complaints Commission ruled against the WHO, the study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1998. Ka Leo O Hawai'i info@newdigitalgroup.com (Rory Walkinshaw Ka Leo Staff Columnist) Wed, 13 Apr 2005 04:00:00 GMT http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showfast.html?article=51032 http://tobacco.org/news/190100.html 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. Manchester Union-Leader Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:00:00 GMT http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7470/813 http://tobacco.org/news/178605.html Admitting mistakes can be difficult, correcting them even harder. Labelling cigarette packets with tar yields (plus nicotine and carbon monoxide) was, and is, a mistake. The mistake was not in the conception of the low tar programme, or even in conducting it as a huge experiment with public health. The error was allowing the tobacco industry to control it. . . . The machine measured figures for tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide should be removed from the packet, and a realistic measure must be established for regulatory purposes (as Canada has done). The current health warnings deal qualitatively with the risks of smoking very well, and misleading figures on the packet can only do harm. British Medical Journal Fri, 08 Oct 2004 04:00:00 GMT http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/wdhopinion/285384904592172.shtml http://tobacco.org/news/174461.html It seems to me that the people in favor of a smoking ban are counting on the mob mentality to achieve their goal. They repeat their mantra, hoping everyone will storm City Hall with clubs and pitchforks, but I need more information before I'll join them. For example, why is the World Health Organization's study of secondhand smoke never discussed? That study concluded that there is no evidence that cancer is caused by secondhand smoke. The study has been repressed. I wonder why. Also, if there really are people in Wausau dying because they entered a restaurant where smoking was allowed, please document with names, ages, places, exposure time and concentration of the smoke. Wausau Daily Herald gwonline@smgpo.gannett.com (Gary L. Lueck, Birnamwood) Sat, 28 Aug 2004 04:00:00 GMT