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.
February 24, 2015
This one day event is to introduce advoactes, students, health professionals, journalists and anyone else is interested in how to use tobacco industry documents in their work. The workshop is at the UCSF Library at 530 Parnassus in San Francisco.
The registration form is online at http://bit.ly/UCSFTDWS2015.
Please feel free to forward it to anyone who you feel may be interested. We look forward to seeing you there!
For more information, contact:
Jonathan Leff, MLIS
Operations Analyst
UCSF Center for Tobacco Control, Research and Education
530 Parnassus Avenue, Suite 366
San Francisco, CA 94143-1390
Tel: (415) 502-6341
Fax: (415) 514-9345
[email protected]
February 24, 2015
Today Tobacco Free Kids launched its "Knock Tobacco Out of the Park" campaign to get spit tobacco out of Major League Baseball. (The press release is here.)
Because the league, owners and players have refused to stop promotting tobacco to millions of people attending and viewing baseball, TFK and other health advocates have been working with lawmakers in Sacramento and San Francisco to introduced legislation that will eliminate the use of all tobacco products, including smokeless tobacco, at all baseball venues.
The effort is timed to coincide with the start of Spring Training. The legislation sends a simple and powerful message to kids: baseball and tobacco don’t mix.