March 13, 2015
Yesterday (March 12, 2015) Dr. Gina Intinarelli, a cardiothoracic nurse from UCSF and I attended the Walt Disney Corp. annual meeting. During the question and answer period, Gina told Disney CEO and Chairman of the Board Robert Iger of the thousands of patients with heart disease and cancer she had care for, that virtually all of these people started smoking as kids, and that the US Surgeon General had concluded that exposure to smoking onscreen caused kids to start smoking. She pointed out that nearly half of the Marvel movies (Disney owns Marvel) had contained smoking. She then asked Mr. Iger for if Disney would implement an “ironclad” policy of keeping smoking.
Iger responded definitively. Here is how it was reported in The Guardian:
March 11, 2015
Two papers were presented at the recent 2015 meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco. Both followed smokers over time and compared quitting cigarettes among smokers who use e-cigarettes with smokers who did not use e-cigarettes. Both studies controlled for level of addiction among the smokers. The first, based on a large national study, the Tobacco Use Supplement of the Current population survey, found that e-cigarette users were less than half as likely to have quit smoking (odds ratio = 0.44) than smokers not using e-cigarettes. The other followed people in a smoking cessation program and found that e-cigarette users were about a third less likely to quit smoking (odd ratio = 0.68).
March 10, 2015
The UCSF Library has added over 30K new documents to the Industry Documents Digital Library, including thousands of Philip Morris documents that were previously unavailable due to their ‘confidential’ designation. Please access the LTDL blog for more info and links to document sets.
Rachel Taketa
Industry Documents Digital Libraries
UCSF Library
530 Parnassus Ave
San Francisco, CA 94143
415-514-1796
March 10, 2015
Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt, and I just published "Sugar Industry Influence on the Scientific Agenda of the National Institute of Dental Research’s 1971 National Caries Program: A Historical Analysis of Internal Documents" in PLoS Medicine. The full paper is here.
Here is the UCSF press release about the paper:
“Sugar Papers” Reveal Industry Role in 1970s Dental Program
A newly discovered cache of industry documents reveals that the sugar industry worked closely with the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s and ‘70s to develop a federal research program focused on approaches other than sugar reduction to prevent tooth decay in American children.
An analysis of those papers by researchers at UC San Francisco appears March 10, 2015 in the open-source scientific journal, PLoS Medicine.
March 9, 2015
Chelsea Catsburg, Anthony Miller, and Thomas Rohan from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Toronto recently published “Active cigarette smoking and risk of breast cancer,” a large, long-term and very well done longitudinal study of 89,835 women followed forward in time for a mean of 22.1 years. They found: