November 1, 2012
California Governor Jerry Brown recently vetoed Assembly Bill 217, which would have made nursing homes smokefree," ignoring the mountain of evidence that secondhand smoke kills. Our new meta-analysis, published in Circulation, means that this veto will mean more elderly California's showing up in emergency rooms with heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks and other cardiac and respiratory emergencies. Many will die.
His veto message uses language straight out of tobacco industry propaganda, he talks about "accommodating" residents' "preferences" to smoke, concluding, "Let's rely on ... the facility and its residents and employees to figure out which accommodations work or don't work."
Here is what Philip Morris says on its corporate web site about the issue:
October 26, 2012
October 23, 2012
Heikki Hiilamo, Eric Crosbie and I just published our paper, "The evolution of health warning labels on cigarette packs: the role of precedents, and tobacco industry strategies to block diffusion" in Tobacco Control.
ABSTRACT
Objective To analyse the evolution and diffusion of health warnings on cigarette packs around the world, including tobacco industry attempts to block this diffusion.
Methods We analysed tobacco industry documents and public sources to construct a database on the global evolution and diffusion of health warning labels from 1966 to 2012, and also analysed industry strategies.
October 12, 2012
Our annual "It's About a Billion Lives" symposium will be from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm in Cole Hall at UCSF (same place as the last two years).
Our keynote speaker will be Legacy Foundation President and CEO Cheryl Healton.
There will also be presentations from two of our fellows, Gideon St. Helen and Amanda Fallin and faculty members Matthew Springer and Wendy Max.
The closing speaker will be UCSF Chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellmann.
See you there!
You can watch the webcast of last year's symposium here.
October 10, 2012
The vendor that had been hosting my web site on smokefree hospitality disappeared, so the TobaccoScam website disappeared with it a few weeks ago.
We have now rebuilt the site on in internal UCSF server and it is back up. (There are a few formatting issues and the ordinance and economic studies are not yet loaded, but these issues will be addressed over the next couple weeks.) The rest of the content is there and all the links work.
We apologize for any inconvenience.