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:
March 8, 2015
Fred Singer, the tobacco denier tuned global warming denier who is presented in Robbie Kenner's new movie Merchants of Doubt, has written this letter to Robbie. Check out the movie to see who you agree with (and see me wearing a tie talking about Big Tobacco and what we have learned from the tobacco industy documents).
Here's the letter:
Also Sent by Registered Mail to Robert Kenner Films, 134 So. Norton St, Suite A, Los Angeles, CA 90004
Dear Mr. Kenner, March 6, 2015
I am writing this letter on the advice of my attorneys, who suggested that a friendly letter from me to you might avoid having to take legal action.
I’ve been informed that your new documentary “Merchants of Doubt” refers to me as “Liar for Hire”. If correct, that is a very serious accusation which of course cannot be backed up in any way.
The word “Liar” implies not only telling something that is not true, but telling an untruth knowingly. So even people who disagree with me on climate-change science (and such people do exist) would have to prove that I don’t really believe what I say – that I am saying it in order to mislead.