November 6, 2012
Laws that end smoking at work and other public places result in significantly fewer hospitalizations for heart attacks, strokes, asthma and other respiratory conditions, a new UCSF analysis has found.
The research provides evidence that smoke-free laws that cover workplaces, restaurants and bars have the biggest impacts on hospitalizations, reduce health care costs and also raise quality of life, the researchers said.
The research is published in the current issue of the American Heart Association journal Circulation. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/126/18/2177
“The public, health professionals, and policy makers need to understand that including exemptions and loopholes in legislation – such as exempting casinos – condemns more people to end up in emergency rooms,’’ said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, UCSF professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF.
“These unnecessary hospitalizations are the real cost of failing to enact comprehensive smoke-free legislation,’’ he said.
For decades, Glantz and his colleagues at UCSF have been pioneers in tobacco research, disclosing how the tobacco industry manipulated its products and led the public into cigarette addiction.
New paper showing how the tobacco companies manipulated the American Law Institute to shape tort law
November 4, 2012
We just published a new paper, "Tobacco Industry Influence on the American Law Institute’s Restatements of Torts and Implications for Its Conflict of Interest Policies," in the Iowa Law Review showing how the tobacco companies quietly shaped influential policy documents to win sympathetic legal interpretations in products liability cases for decades. Many of these policies are still in force today.
Here is a summary of the paper:
November 4, 2012
November 1, 2012
California Governor Jerry Brown recently vetoed Assembly Bill 217, which would have made nursing homes smokefree," ignoring the mountain of evidence that secondhand smoke kills. Our new meta-analysis, published in Circulation, means that this veto will mean more elderly California's showing up in emergency rooms with heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks and other cardiac and respiratory emergencies. Many will die.
His veto message uses language straight out of tobacco industry propaganda, he talks about "accommodating" residents' "preferences" to smoke, concluding, "Let's rely on ... the facility and its residents and employees to figure out which accommodations work or don't work."
Here is what Philip Morris says on its corporate web site about the issue: