Category: tobacco control

Health organizations urging the Obama administration in the fight with the federal court decision blocking the graphic warnings from appearing on cigarette packs. Judge Richard J. Leon U.S. Court for the District of Columbia, February 29, ruled unconstitutional a rule, the Food and Drug necessarily new images, which include a photo of a person smoking through a hole tracheotomy and a dead man with a transaction-scarred chest.
The images were to begin appearing on packages in September. The American Lung Assn, American Cancer Society and others have called the ruling a threat to public health and have asked the Justice Department to appeal this decision as soon as possible.
“We strongly disagree with [the judge] concluded that the new graphic warningsneither factual nor accurate,»the Association said in a statement.” The facts are clear and indisputable that cigarette smoking is addictive, harms children, causes fatal lung disease, cancer, stroke and heart disease, and can kill you. ”
Ministry of Justice and the FDA declined to comment on the decision or to discuss the next step housing. On its website, FDA said, because of ongoing litigation, pursuant to notice the date is uncertain. Ministry of Health and Human Services has remained positive about the implementation of the warning.
“This administration intends to do everything we can to warn young people about the dangers of smoking, which remains the leading preventable cause of death in America”, HHS said in a statement. “We are confident that efforts to stop these warnings are important in the future will ultimately fail.”
The judge correctly decided that the execution of image violates the First Amendment rights of tobacco manufacturers, said Martin L. Holton III, executive vice president and general counsel for RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co, one of the plaintiffs.
“We believe the government, health authorities, manufacturers of tobacco products, and others share the responsibility for providing accurate information to consumers of tobacco on the various health risks associated with smoking,” said Holton. “However, the purpose of informing the public about the risks of tobacco use may and shall be in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.”
Prevention aimed at preventing smoking
FDA published a text and graphic health warnings in June 2011, claiming the tobacco companies should be prepared to place them on all cigarette packs, boxes and advertising, since September 2012. Warnings have been part of the family smoking prevention and tobacco control law, which came into force in 2009. The labels were aimed at reducing tobacco consumption of the nation and preventing others from starting to smoke, FDA said.
R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco companies sued the government over the images in August 2011.
The American Medical Association joined other health organizations in submitting three friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the warnings.
“The overwhelming evidence suggests that the existing warning failed to adequately inform the public of the risks of tobacco use and that the industry deliberately undermined these warnings, distorting the health consequences of smoking and the sale of its products for children,” one of the memos said. “The evidence also establishes that a large, graphic warnings required [FDA] as effective at raising public awareness about the dangers of smoking and reduce tobacco consumption.”
Leon is temporarily disabled warning in November 2011. In its February 29 opinion, Leon tells not only the image violates the Constitution, but the FDA also failed to pass through the image of any evidence of actual health effects of smoking.
“It is clear that the actual purpose of government is not to inform or educate, and advocate for changes in behavior, in particular, to encourage smoking cessation and discourage potential new smokers from the beginning,” said Leon. “Reliance on government graphics – which were selected based on their ability to evoke emotion, a criterion that does not affect whether the graphics affects the knowledge of consumers about the risks of smoking – in combination with a toll-free number, also supports the conclusion that the true purpose of government is to convince consumers that they should “get out now.”
Leon’s ruling conflicts with a 2010 federal court decision in a similar lawsuit. In this case, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky said that the graphics were legitimate.

Annual government funding for tobacco control is just several hundred thousand yuan for each province on the Chinese mainland, far below what’s needed and much less than the amounts provided in other countries, anti-smoking experts said.
In the United States, hundreds of millions of dollars are allocated annually for tobacco control research and projects, said Jonathan Samet, chairman of the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Although we’ve seen the prevalence of both the smoking epidemic and lung cancer decline in the US, tobacco control is still an urgent and important issue, given that nicotine is highly addictive and we don’t want our children to take up smoking,” he told China Daily in an interview on Sunday.
In 2011, the US had about 221,000 new cases of lung cancer, while about 157,000 people died from the disease, according to estimates from the US National Cancer Institute.
“Unfortunately, less-educated people today suffer the most from smoking in the US,” said Samet. He said that the smoking rate among the college-educated was less than 10 percent, but it was 40 percent among those who hadn’t finished high school.
Samet said that the prevalence of smoking peaked around 1961 in the US, when half of the men and 35 percent of the women smoked.
Now, less than 20 percent of the US population smokes. The rates are about equal for men and women but vary widely across the country, he said.
Tobacco control campaigns in the US started in the 1960s, following the first report linking smoking and lung cancer. Most offices and public places have become smoke-free in the past 15 years.
“Increasing public awareness and changing social norms helped achieve the change,” said Samet, himself brought up by parents who smoked.
The change has improved the US public health situation. Lung cancer rates among men began to drop some 20 years ago, while in women they are just beginning to decrease, he added.
However, in China, the lung cancer rate has kept increasing in the past decade, said Shi Yuankai, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Cancer Hospital. “It’s about an annual increase of 5 percent.”
“That rising trend won’t be reversed within 20 to 30 years, due to both smoking and air pollution,” he said.
Usually, smoking goes way up and about 20 to 30 years later, there is an evident rise in lung cancer, Samet said.
In China, smoking rates began to increase after the late 1970s and then dropped slightly in the 1990s, said Yang Gonghuan, head of the China Tobacco Control Office under the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
But in the early 2000s, the smoking rate “began to climb a little bit again”, she said.
Health experts attributed that change to Chinese tobacco companies’ low-tar promotion strategy, which was undertaken in response to rising pressure for tobacco control, particularly after China ratified the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2005.
Between 2000 and 2010, China experienced a 41.15 percent rise in cigarette sales, official statistics show.
Samet said that reducing the amount of tar and nicotine in cigarettes didn’t change the risk to human health.
Asked to comment on China’s new “tobacco academician”, Xie Jianping, who was inducted into the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said: “That’s quite unusual and couldn’t happen in the US, where tobacco researchers are hired secretly by tobacco companies.”
Yang said the government’s monopoly on tobacco was the root cause of such a situation.
Unlike in the US, where the tobacco industry is regulated by health departments, specifically the FDA, China’s tobacco industry is regulated by the State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau, which also represents the China National Tobacco Corp.
Taking into account the huge costs of smoking, in terms of treating smoking- related diseases and the loss of lives, “the Chinese government should try to get out of the tobacco business,” Samet said.
chinadaily.com

Smokers who want to quit will find more help in Oregon than in most other states, the American Lung Association reports:
“Oregon is tied with North Carolina and Arkansas as the sixth most quit-friendly state in the country, because of its comprehensive approach to helping smokers quit. In 2009, the state Legislature passed a law requiring health insurance plans in Oregon to fully cover tobacco cessation treatments. Every health plan providing coverage to Medicaid enrollees covers tobacco cessation treatments, as does the health plan offered to Oregon state employees.”
Oregon is one of only six states that include full coverage of tobacco-cessation treatments in Medicaid, a state and federally funded health program for the poor and disabled. But Oregon’s spending on a tobacco quit line, $5.49 per smoker for fiscal year 2012, is barely half the the amount recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: $10.53 per smoker.
Oregon’s total allocation for tobacco prevention and cessation — $8.3 million a year —
is less than one-fifth the CDC’s recommendation, according to a recent analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Oregon’s prevention spending amounts to 2.5 percent of the estimated $326 million in revenue the state collects each year from tobacco industry legal settlement payments and tobacco taxes. Tobacco company spending on marketing exceeds Oregon’s investment in prevention by a ratio of 13.5 to 1.
By Joe Rojas-Burke
oregonlive.com

States are being shortsighted by shifting tobacco control programs to cut spending because smoking cessation saves lots of money, a San Francisco economist.
Funding tobacco control programs at recommend levels could save 14 to 20 times more than the cost of implementing the programs, said Sudip Chattopadhyay of the San Francisco State University and David R. Pieper at University of California, Berkeley.
Published in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy, the study said the costs of smoking are felt by the states, mainly through medical costs, Medicaid payments and the loss of productivity by workers.
The researchers used data from 1991 to 2007, the period in which states paid for the tobacco control programs with the help of the tobacco taxes, public and private initiatives and funds from the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement between the nation’s four largest tobacco companies and 46 states.
Chattopadhyay and Pieper said state tobacco control programs have a “sustained and steadily increasing long-run impact” on the demand for cigarettes, but in hard economic times, several states have turned to tobacco control funds and taxes to help balance state budgets, UPI.com reported.
Since 2002, funding has dropped and states, on average, spent 17 percent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended levels in 2010 for smoking cessation, state smoke-free laws, regulating tobacco products and advertising.
“Almost all states are facing financial crisis, and they are really diverting their funds,” UPI quoted the researchers as saying in a statement. “If tobacco control funding was restored, states “would save money in terms of reduced Medicaid, and reduced medical and productivity costs – costs that are only going to go up.”
By Jasmine Williams
thirdage.com