March 11, 2017
The evidence that e-cigarettes are just as bad as conventional cigarettes for effects on blood and blood vessels keeps piling up. Aline Sabrina Rau and colleagues at the University of Colorado just published “Electronic Cigarettes Are as Toxic to Skin Flap Survival as Tobacco Cigarettes” in the Annals of Plastic Survey.
An important factor in wound healing is adequate circulation in small blood vessels. Inadequate circulation leads to slower healing and even tissue death (necrosis). Rau and colleagues did an experiment in which they exposed rats to high levels of secondhand cigarette smoke and aerosol from two different Blu e-cigarettes, one that exposed the rats to the same level of airborne nicotine as the tobacco cigarettes and one that exposed them to twice the nicotine. The rats were exposed for 4 weeks, then surgery done, and the wound measured after another week of exposure.
Bottom line: The effects on the cigarette smoke and e-cigarette aerosol were the same, independent of the nicotine level.
Rau and colleagues explained this finding as follows:
March 11, 2017
One of the main ways that smoking increases the risk of heart disease is by activating platelets, cells in blog that stick together and form blood clots. When you cut yourself, this is a good thing, because it stops bleeding. When platelets are activated inappropriately, they stick to the lining of arteries (the endothelium) and tear it up. When a blood clot floating around in your blood stream blocks an artery in your heart it causes a heart attack; when it blocks an artery in your brain is causes a stroke.
Sara Hom and colleagues at the State University of New York, recently published “Platelet activation, adhesion, inflammation, and aggregation potential are altered in the presence of electronic cigarette extracts of variable nicotine concentrations,” which exposed human blood platelets to extracts from conventional cigarette smoke and e-cigarette aerosol. They found that both stimulated platelet activation and that this effect is due to the ultrafine particles in both, not the nicotine.
They sum their results up nicely in their paper:
March 1, 2017
Tobacco Free Kids recently distributed this summary of a new paper documenting fewer heart attacks following implementation of a smokefree law, this time in Brazil:
São Paulo, a city of more than 12 million inhabitants, was the first city in Brazil to enact a comprehensive smoke-free law. A two-part study published in Tobacco Control evaluated the impact of the law. The first phase reported the positive effects of the smoking ban on air quality, while the second phase analyzed the rates of hospitalization and deaths for heart attacks before and after the enactment of the law (2005-2010). The time-series study primarily uses hospital admission and mortality data from DATASUS, the primary public health database in Brazil, the Mortality Information System (SIM), and population and pollutant data.
Key Findings
February 26, 2017
We submitted this public comment to the FDA last week. The tracking number is 1k1-8uvs-bibu. A PDF version is available here.
FDA Should Not Extend the Comment Period for its Proposed Tobacco Product Standard Limiting NNN Levels in Finished Smokeless Tobacco Products
Docket Number: FDA-2016-N-2527
UCSF TCORS
Benjamin Chaffee, Wendy Max, Lauren Lempert, Stanton Glantz
February 22, 2017
Because it is an urgent matter of public health, UCSF TCORS (which includes dental, medical, nursing, and public health professionals, scientists, economists, and lawyers) opposes any extension of time to comment on FDA’s proposed rule limiting NNN levels in smokeless tobacco products. Rather, FDA should keep its April 10, 2017 deadline for the comment period, and quickly finalize the proposed rule without delay.
February 23, 2017
Catherine Egbe, Stella Bialous, and I just published “Avoiding “A Massive Spin-Off Effect in West Africa and Beyond”: The Tobacco Industry Stymies Tobacco Control in Nigeria” in Nicotine and Tobacco Research. This paper uses tobacco industry documents to show how the tobacco industry to show how BAT and other tobacco companies blocked development and implementation of Nigeria’s first tobacco control law in the 1990s.
This bit of history highlights the importance of strong implementation of FCTC Article 5.3, which commits parties to the treaty to keep the tobacco companies from infiltrating the government’s policy making process. We also illustrate how the industry is continuing such activities today.
Another important lesson, which is reinforced from earlier work outside Africa, is that the tobacco companies are acutely aware of the global importance of precedent, something that the public health community often ignores.
Africa is a key battleground in global tobacco control and there are initiatives under way to increase taxes there. This paper illustrates how succeeding in that effort will require understanding and countering tobacco industry influence.
Here is the abstract: