Monthly Archives: August 2009

China Is Finally Getting Tough On Smoking

In a striking case for country of 350 million smokers, a man in the southwestern Chinese metropolis of Chongqing was jailed for five days for smoking in a wholesale market, according to local newspaper the Chongqing Evening News.

Smoke-Free Laws Push Questionable Tobacco Alternatives

LANSING, Mich. – Not being able to light up legally in a public place in many Michigan communities doesn’t mean the tobacco companies and others have stopped trying to get people hooked on nicotine. A raft of new products are hitting the marketplace, designed to allow people to inhale or ingest nicotine without smoke – and that has the American Lung Association concerned.

Gruesome cigarette warning labels are coming to the U.S.

Gruesome pictorial cigarette-package warnings will be coming to the U.S. relatively soon, according to a recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Smoking in the military: An old habit dies hard

FORWARD OPERATING BASE FALCON, Iraq — Gen. Douglas MacArthur had his signature corncob pipe. Soldiers got cigarettes in their C-rations during World War II. Even today, America’s war on tobacco seems to have largely bypassed the military.

E-Cigarette Foes Hazardous To Health

BOSTON – Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal recently announced plans to seek a ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes in the state. This ill-advised decision follows a federal Food and Drug Administration report that put a scare into electronic cigarette users across the country, telling them that these battery-powered devices — which deliver nicotine without burning tobacco like conventional cigarettes — are dangerous because they contain carcinogens.

Key Issues of the Healthcare Reform Effort

Congress returns next week to address three key interrelated issues related to healthcare reform-accessibility, affordability and sustainability. How do we best expand coverage so that all Americans have financial access to needed care? How do we make sure such coverage is affordable? Finally, how do we control the greater than inflation rate of health care spending over time so that coverage can be sustained? These questions pose monumental challenges.

Tobacco Plant Helps Sprout Norovirus Vaccine

Scientists modified a tobacco plant to produce a vaccine for norovirus, the viral infection sometimes called the “cruise ship virus.” Researchers led by Charles Arntzen, PhD, a biologist and codirector of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University, believe the novel plant biotechnology methods may someday facilitate rapid development of vaccines for other viruses such as H1N1 influenza, especially when the virus has mutated beyond the effectiveness of established vaccines.

FDA Opens Center for Tobacco Products

On Aug. 19, 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration opened a new Center for Tobacco Products on the agency’s White Oak Campus in Silver Spring, Maryland. The Center will set performance standards, review premarket applications, and establish and enforce advertising and promotion restrictions for tobacco products. Its goal will be to reduce the number of deaths that the products cause each year.

Changing the course of cancer history

More than 500 world leaders, non-governmental organisations, corporation representatives and individual advocates gathered this week at the Livestrong Global Cancer Summit at the RDS in Dublin.