August 12, 2014
In the June 2014 issue of ASHRAE Journal, Bud Offerman, an expert on indoor air published a well-done risk assessment of active and passive exposure to e-cigarette aerosol using standard methods. (ASHRAE is the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineering, the organization that develops engineering standards for, among other things, building ventilation systems. The tobacco companies spent years keeping ASHRAE from identifying secondhand smoke as a serious indoor air pollutant, something ASHRAE eventually did.)
Here are the first and last paragraphs of Offerman's paper:
The prevalence of the use of e-cigarettes is increasing. E-cigarettes are marketed as an alternative to smoking tobacco that only produces harmless water vapor, with no adverse impact on indoor air quality. However, published literature seems to show that e-cigarettes are not harmless. Photo 1 shows an e-cigarette user exhaling a dense visible aerosol into the surrounding air. This visible aerosol consists of condensed submicron liquid droplets, which contain many chemicals including some that are carcinogenic, such as formaldehyde, metals (cadmium, lead, nickel), and nitrosamines.
August 12, 2014
Members of the US Senate and House of Representatives sent a strongly worded letter to the FDA and Office of Management and Budget last week criticising the agencies for grossly understating the benefits of tobacco regulation, then discounting these understanded benefits because of lost "consumer surplus," i.e., the lost pleasure due to no longer smoking.
They also highlight the implications for other health and safety regulations, like nutrition standards, that the FDA and OMB economists have suggested should also be the object of a consumer surplus discount.
Read the full letter here.
August 8, 2014
Submitted to FDA:
Docket No. FDA-2014-N-0189
August 8, 2014
FDA and OMB should put the public health first, as the law directs them to.
Stanton A. Glantz, PhD
Professor and Director
The tracking number is 1jy-8dof-xl8c.
Thanks to Joel Dunnington for sending this around.
August 8, 2014
FDA Should Prohibit Flavors in all Tobacco Products including Electronic Cigarettes
Docket No. FDA-2014-N-0189
Emily Anne McDonald, PhD
Lauren K. Lempert, JD
Ganna Kostygina, PhD MPH
Pamela M. Ling, MPH, MD
Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education
University of California San Francisco
August 6, 2014
Although flavored cigarettes were banned under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention Tobacco Control Act (TCA)[1], flavored tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), continue to be widely available.