September 21, 2014
Erich Schwartzel, an enterprising reporter for The Wall Street Journal, published an article last week about the e-cigarette industry’s use of paid product placement in American movies (Coming soon to theaters near you: E-cigarettes, 14 Sept 2014). Among other revelations, the story notes that Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of the “mini-major” movie studio Relativity, serves on an e-cigarette company’s board and aims to use mainstream films to promote the products. Billionaire Ron Burkle, a major political contributor, is Relativity’s second-largest investor.
The Wall Street Journal also notes that domestic tobacco giants, barred from placing tobacco products in films by the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with state attorneys general, could soon be swarming Hollywood to promote the products of their own e-cigarette divisions.
September 13, 2014
September 13, 2014
Just as I was leaving for vacation a few weeks ago, Ann McNeill, Jean-Francois Etter, Konstantinos Farsalinos, Peter Hajek, Jacques l e Housezec, and Hayden McRobbie published a blistering critique of the review of the scientific evidence on e-cigarettes that Rachel Grana, Neal Benowitz, and I prepared for the WHO last year and the subsequent peer reviewed review paper that we published in Circulation a few months later based on the WHO report (that included several important papers published after we delivered the report to WHO).
When I finally read the NcNeill critique when I returned, I was surprised at its harsh tone, but, in consultation with my coauthors, decided that nothing would be gained by responding. Our work is available for all to read to judge whether we made a fair assessment of the evidence.
A few days ago, however, I received a copy of a detailed response to the McNeill et al paper prepared by David W Bareham, which I reproduce in full below.
August 22, 2014
The CDC today updated its official fact sheet on smoking in movies.
Among many other important things, it says: "Giving an R rating to future movies with smoking would be expected to reduce the number of teen smokers by nearly 1 in 5 (18%) and prevent one million deaths from smoking among children alive today."
It also says: "In 2012, the Surgeon General concluded that exposure to onscreen smoking in movies causes young people to start smoking. Because of this exposure to smoking in movies: 6.4 million children alive today will become smokers, and 2 million of these children will die prematurely from diseases caused by smoking."
It also contains data on individual studios' performace in 2013.
The Full official link, stable from year to year is http://www.cdc.gov//tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/youth_data/movie...
Check it out!
August 13, 2014
Bianca Cox and colleagues just published a nicely done paper, “Impact of stepwise introduction of smoke-free legislation on population rates of acute myocardial infarction deaths in Flanders, Belgium,” that shows that, after controlling for time trends, seasons, air pollution, and other factors, there were big drops in heart attack mortality immediately after smokefree laws were implemented.
Here is the abstract:
Objective Many studies demonstrated a decline in hospital admissions for cardiovascular diseases after the implementation of a smoking ban, but evidence for reductions in cardiovascular mortality is more limited. In Belgium, smoke-free legislation was implemented in different phases. Public places and most workplaces became smoke-free in January 2006, whereas the legislative ban on smoking in restaurants was introduced in January 2007. These successive steps in legislation provided us the opportunity to investigate possible stepwise changes in fatal acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rates.
Methods Data on all AMI deaths of 30 years of age or older in Flanders (Belgium) between 2000 and 2009 (n=38 992) were used. Age-standardised AMI death rates were analysed with segmented Poisson regression allowing for secular trends, seasonality, temperature, PM10 and influenza.