January 9, 2015
Governor Jerry Brown, who has carefully cultivated his image as a frugal fiscal disciplinarian. just released his budget where he continues to scold UC and CSU for being wasteful rather than accepting the reality that it costs money to provide high quality affordable higher education.
At the November 19, 2014 Regents’ meeting he said he was going to deliberately underfund UC to force the Regents to make big changes “because it is so hard to work change in complex institutions, often time the pressure of not having enough money can force creativity that otherwise can’t even be considered. I know the State, when we had a $27 billion deficit; we had to make changes, and not just cuts, but changes in the way that we do business.”
But who has been the real miser over the years?
In his first post-Schwarzenegger budget, Brown reversed Governor Schwarzenegger’s tripling of the Governor’s office budget. The Governor’s office’s budget was $7.8 million in Governor Davis’s last budget in inflation adjusted dollars (before Schwarzenegger boosted it to $23 million in his first year), and Governor Brown spent $8.4 million on that office in his first budget.
January 8, 2015
The City and County of San Francisco has joined the State of Alaska in mounting a public education campaign on e-cigarettes.
The campaign includes ads on the sides of over 130 San Francisco (Muni
) buses as well as over 130 BART/Muni station railside wall ads, and 750 cards on the interior of buses where riders can see them while they stand/sit and commute.
Several of the ads are in Chinese and Spanish to reach a larger segment of San Francisco’s diverse population.
January 7, 2015
Today, January 7, 2015, the New York Times just published a Reuters investigative article exposing the tobacco industry’s global corporate responsibility (CSR) schemes. Specifically, the article focuses on its decades-long history of donations to the American Red Cross. This is a huge blow to the tobacco industry's global strategy to gloss over its tarnished image through CSR and has the potential to build more support for other NGOs to drop tobacco industry funding.
This article is also an important follow-up to the decision adopted at WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Sixth Conference of the Parties recommendations to protect public health policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry, which requests the Secretariat promote Article 5.3 and its guidelines to pertinent international organizations and ensure rejection of any direct or indirect contributions from the tobacco industry.
December 28, 2014
It’s About a Billion Lives
Celebrating Tobacco Research and Education at UCSF
Finish It. Tobacco Prevention for the Post-Millennial Generation Robin Koval
President and CEO, American Legacy Foundation
Health Impact of Expanding E-Cigarette Sales
Sara Kalkhoran, MD
Clinical Fellow
I Smoked, I Quit... All Because of You: Leveraging Family and Peer Support for Quitting
Janice Tsoh, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Kirk Versus Spock: Emotion, Reason and Tobacco Warning Labels
Lucy Popova, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
The Smoker’s Brain: Damaged, but Capable of Recovery
Dieter Meyerhoff, PhD
Professor, Radiology and Biomedical Imaging
Director, Substance Abuse Neuroimaging DVA Medical Center
Closing Remarks
B. Joseph Guglielmo, PharmD
Professor and Dean, School of Pharmacy
Friday, January 30, 2015, 8:00 AM – 12:30 PM
December 23, 2014
E-cigarette companies and the people who support them love to point out that the flavors used in e-cigarettes are "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS). The GRAS definition applies to ingested (eaten) not inhaled (breathed) use of these chemicals.
In fact, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of America (FEMA), the organization which assigns most of the GRAS designations, specifically warns its members to ensure that workers are protected from inhaling flavors while working with them. In its 32 page guide, Respiratory Health and Safety in the Flavor Manufacturing Workplace, it recommends that the following two signs be posted where people are working with flavors:
WARNING – This flavor may pose an inhalation hazard if improperly handled. Please contact your workplace safety officer before opening and handling, and read the MSDS [material safety data sheet]. Handling of this flavor that results in inhalation of fumes, especially if the flavor is heated, may cause severe adverse health effects.