September 26, 2019
Amy Hafez, Mariaelena Gonzalez, Maggie Kulik MC, Maya Vijayaraghavan, and I just published “Uneven Access to Smoke-Free Laws and Policies and Its Effect on Health Equity in the United States: 2000-2019” in American Journal of Public Health. It reviews the literature and finds that although overall smoking prevalence has declined, it remains high among many subpopulations that are disproportionately burdened by tobacco use, resulting in tobacco-related health disparities. Slow diffusion of smoke-free laws to rural regions, particularly in the South and Southeast, and uneven adoption of voluntary policies in single-family homes and multiunit housing are key policy variables associated with the disproportionate burden of tobacco-related health disparities in these subpopulations. Developing policies that expand the reach of comprehensive smoke-free laws not only will facilitate the decline in smoking prevalence among subpopulations disproportionately burdened by tobacco use but will also decrease exposure to secondhand smoke and further reduce tobacco-caused health disparities in the United States.
September 26, 2019
With the replacement of Juul CEO Kevin burns by Altria’s Chief Growth Officer K.C. Crosthwaite, Juul has dropped any pretense of not being a tobacco company.
Juul also announced that the company is suspending all broadcast, print and digital product advertising in the U.S., and is refraining from lobbying the administration on its recently announced policy that would pull flavored e-cigarettes from the market that haven’t received marketing authorization from FDA, and would “comply with the final policy” when effective. through the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) process. (Juul, however, is continuing to spend millions of dollars on ads that contain unauthorized reduced risk and cessation claims in its campaign to pass San Francisco Proposition C, which would replace the City’s existing e-cig regulations with ones Juul wrote.)
September 24, 2019
Our colleagues in England who remain wedded to e-cigs have been saying that the cases of lipoid pneumonia are an American phenomena. They missed this case report -- Respiratory failure caused by lipoid pneumonia from vaping e-cigarettes – published by BMJ showing the same problems are happening there as in America (and other countries).
Here is the abstract:
September 22, 2019
In a strongly worded editorial, "No on Prop. C: Don’t let Juul write San Francisco’s vaping laws," the San Francisco Chronicle came out foursquare against the Juul initiative, Proposition C.
September 21, 2019
Michelle Manderski, Binu Singh, and Cristine Delnevo wrote a letter to American Journal of Preventive Medicine criticizing the paper that Talal Alzahrani and I published using the 2014 and 2016 National Health Interview Survey to demonstrate a cross-sectional association between using e-cigarettes and having had a heart attack on the grounds that we did not include the 2015 data.
As we pointed out in our response, “Adding Data From 2015 Strengthens the Association Between E-Cigarette Use and Myocardial Infarction.” The reason that we did not include 2015 in the original paper is that we did not realize that the 2015 survey asked about e-cigarettes because the question was in a supplement not the main survey. In any event, adding the new data made the association between nondaily e-cig user and MI significant, something that we did not find in our original study. Daily e-cig use was statistically significant in both the original study and with the 2015 data added.