March 8, 2015
E-cigarette interests widely justify the use of food flavorings as safe because they are "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS). GRAS determinants apply to additives in food that are eaten not inhaled. On March 3, 2015, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers; Association (FEMA) updated its statement. "The Safety Assessment and Regulatory Authority to Use Flavors – Focus on E-Cigarettes;" this document bluntly rejects the claims being made for e-cigarettes. In part it reads:
2. None of the primary safety assessment programs for flavors, including the GRAS program sponsored by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States (FEMA), evaluate flavor ingredients for use in products other than human food. FEMA GRAS status for the use of a flavor ingredient in food does not provide regulatory authority to use the flavor ingredient in e-cigarettes in the U.S. E-cigarette and flavor manufacturers and marketers should not represent or suggest that the flavor ingredients used in e-cigarettes are safe because they have FEMA GRAS status for use in food because such statements are false and misleading.
March 4, 2015
Amanda Fallin, Maria Roditis, and I just delivered our independent evaluation of the UC Tobacco Free Policy to the UC Office of the President.
Here is the Executive Summary:
March 2, 2015
Check out Robert Kenner's new movie, Merchants of Doubt, which is opening later this week. It starts out with Big Tobacco (and me wearing a suit) talking about how the tobacco companies invented modern science denial, then goes on to show how the fossil fuel companies and their allies used the same methods (and a lot of the same people) to create unjustified doubt about global warming.
The movie is packed with information and, while dealing with a lot of heavy material, does it with a sense of humor.
I've done a lot of media work over the years and this is one of the best things I've ever helped with.
You can watch the trailer here and find a list of where it is playing is here.
March 2, 2015
Researchers at the American Cancer Society, Harvard, and National Cancer Institute published “Smoking and Mortality – Beyond Established Causes” in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 12, 2015. This paper attracted a lot of media attention because it added several new diseases to the list that smoking causes, including breast cancer, which added another 60,000 deaths to the annual toll.
The fact that researchers at the American Cancer Society and Harvard are now recognizing that smoking causes breast cancer is a big development, since they have been the main skeptics of the conclusion that secondhand smoke caused breast cancer in younger, primarily premenopausal women that the California Environmental Protection Agency reached ten years ago, in 2005.
The ACS/Harvard/NCI paper concluded that smoking increased the risk of breast cancer by about 30% (a relative risk of 1.3 with a 95% confidence interval extending from 1.2 to 1.5) in older women (55 and older). This is about the same risk that Ken Johnson and I estimated based on smaller studies than in the new paper.
March 2, 2015
I attended the Society for Nicotine and Tobacco Research meeting last week and it was one of the best meetings on tobacco control I ever attended. All the presentations I saw were intelligent and well-balanced and I learned a lot.
Putting these meetings togeher is hard and I wanted to publicly thank the organizing committee led by Jodi Prochaska for a job well done.