September 30, 2014
Shareholders Challenge Major Hollywood Studios to Account for 1,000,000 Smoking Deaths (press release and NY Times story)
Surgeon General and CDC Directly Link Smoking in Movies to Youth Initiation that Could be Eliminated with an R Rating
Milwaukee, WI – Today (September 26, 2014) faith-based shareholders, who are part of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and the shareholder advocacy organization As You Sow, filed shareholder resolutions with The Walt Disney Company and Viacom (parent of Paramount) asking the Hollywood movie studios to respond to the Surgeon General and CDC report that an R rating of films with smoking imagery could save 1,000,0 lives.
September 25, 2014
Maciej L. Goniewicz and Lily Lee have published a paper, "Electronic Cigarettes Are a Source of Thirdhand Exposure to Nicotine" in Nicotine and Tobacco Research. The title says it all, but here is the abstract:
Introduction: Substances remaining on the surfaces in areas where people have smoked contribute to thirdhand exposure. Nicotine from tobacco smoke has been shown to react with oxidizing chemicals in the air to form secondary pollutants, such as carcinogenic nitrosamines. While previous studies have demonstrated thirdhand exposure to nicotine from tobacco smoke, none has investigated whether nicotine from electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) can also be deposited on various surfaces.
Methods: Three brands of e-cigarettes were refilled with varying nicotine concentrations. We released 100 puffs from each product directly into an exposure chamber. Surface wipe samples were taken from five indoor 100cm2 surfaces (window, walls, floor, wood, and metal) pre and post release of vapors. Nicotine was extracted from the wipes and analyzed using gas chromatography.
September 25, 2014
Sara Borderud and colleagues from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center just published an exceptionally well-done longitudinal study, "Electronic Cigarette Use Among Patients with Cancer,' on how use of e-cigarettes affects success in people trying to quit smoking as part of an organized smoking cessation program. It showed that, at best, the e-cigarette users did no better in quitting smoking and likely did a lot worse than smokers trying to quit who did not use e-cigarettes.
They assessed e-cigarette use among patients with cancer who had joined an evidence-based smoking cessation program at Sloan Kettering. The followed the patients for 6 to 12 months and assessed quitting success among people using e-cigarettes and those not using them.
In addition to being a prospective longtudinal study, other strengths include the fact that the investigators controlled for a range of demographic variables, the type of cancer the smokers had, and, most important, how addicted to nicotine they were (a common complaint about other studies from e-cigarette advocates).
September 25, 2014
From the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library:
For the past year we have been developing a new LTDL with expanded functionality and an updated look. We would like your help in testing the beta site so we can iron out the wrinkles as we continue to add new features.
If you’re curious, click here to go to the Industry Documents Digital Library, the portal to both LTDL and the Drug Industry Document Archive. You can search for tobacco documents from the portal.
You might want to start by watching the tutorial, also accessible from the Tutorial Videos link at the bottom of each page, or you can plunge right in and see how intuitive the site is.
Please keep track of any problems you encounter and let us know about them on the survey, also accessible at the top of the home page. We need to know what you love and hate about the site.
September 23, 2014
Late last August, shortly before I left for vacation the WHO released its report on e-cigarettes (with WHO calls Electronic Nicotine Delivery Devices, ENDS), Electronic nicotine delivery systems. At the time I was too busy to put out a blog post highlighting the report, so am adding one now. It continues the WHO's policy of basing its recommendations on the scientific evidence.
Here are the policy recommendations: