Sixteen years ago, Victor DeNoble testified before Congress about the addictive qualities of nicotine and how his research was suppressed by the tobacco industry.

These days, the scientist travels the country telling students about the harmful effects of cigarettes and other tobacco products. He delivered the message Monday to 400 students attending two assemblies at Pitman High School.

The former whistle-blower will speak at Turlock High School on Friday as well as schools in San Joaquin County this week as part of the Kaiser Permanente “Don’t Buy The Lie” anti-smoking program. Kaiser has run the program in Sacramento-area schools for 17 years and extended the campaign to the Northern San Joaquin Valley this year.
DeNoble, a former researcher for Philip Morris, said federal officials were holding him in protective custody in 1994, when seven tobacco industry executives told a congressional committee that cigarettes were not harmful to the millions of smokers in the United States.

“I would tell Congress that nicotine changes the structure of this,” DeNoble told the Pitman students, holding up a small jar containing the brain of a lab rat.

He made the students squirm by giving them a close-up look at the rat brain, a monkey brain and human brain, all of which showed the effects of repeated exposure to nicotine, he said.

As with all addictive drugs, nicotine changes the function of the brain’s dopamine system, DeNoble said. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that produces feelings of contentment and is associated with addiction.

DeNoble, a behavioral pharmacologist, was researching drug addiction at the University of Minnesota in 1979 when cigarette maker Philip Morris offered him a job. According to DeNoble, company officials told him their products killed 138,000 people a year, and they wanted him to develop a drug to replace nicotine in cigarettes.

Besides being addictive, nicotine has been shown to have adverse effects on the cardiovascular system.

Assigned to a research lab in Richmond, Va., DeNoble and a colleague conducted nicotine studies with lab animals and were involved in developing a safer cigarette for Philip Morris. However, DeNoble said, company officials declined to use the nicotine substitute because it would look like an admission tobacco products had harmed smokers for decades.

Philip Morris fired DeNoble in 1984 and prevented him from publishing his research. A secrecy agreement he had signed kept him quiet for 10 years, but he became the first tobacco- industry whistle-blower to testify before Congress in the 1990s.

These days, he travels to many states giving his “Inside the Dark Side” talks to students.

A Philip Morris spokesman said Monday that it had no comment on the content of DeNoble’s presentations.

DeNoble told the Pitman students that the developing brains of young people are sensitive to addictive drugs such as nicotine. Despite limits on tobacco advertising, the industry targets young people with colorful ads in magazines and has no way of excluding minors from Internet chat rooms for smokers, he said.

Caleb Porter, a Pitman sophomore, said Monday’s assembly was fascinating.

“He has a very interesting story, sort of like an epic movie,” he said, adding that smoking is not for him. “I have no desire to try it.”

The “Don’t Buy The Lie” program includes a contest in which high school students design posters with anti-smoking messages. The grand prize winner gets a $1,000 gift card and his or her anti-smoking message put on billboards in the Central Valley. Runners-up receive $50 gift cards.

By Ken Carlson, Modbee

A subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc. has agreed to alter its marketing to specify that organic tobacco does not provide safer tobacco or cigarettes for smokers.
The settlement agreement involving Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. and the attorneys general of 33 states, including North Carolina, took effect Monday.

Santa Fe sells Natural American Spirit cigarettes and organic tobacco for roll-your-own tobacco users. Two cigarette styles — “light mellow taste” and “regular full-bodied taste” are listed on the pack as being made with 100 percent organic tobacco.

On its Web site, Santa Fe already has a disclaimer similar in size to the surgeon general’s warning. The disclaimer reads “no additives in our tobacco does not mean a safer cigarette.”

The disclaimers substitute “organic tobacco” in the place of “no additives.”

Edmund Brown Jr., the attorney general for California, said that the states were concerned that Santa Fe’s advertising may have been misleading consumers into believing that its organic products were less harmful than other tobacco products.

“There is currently no competent or reliable scientific evidence to support this conclusion,” the attorneys general said in the agreement.

The attorneys general had considered taking legal action because they felt the advertising may have been in violation of the Master Settlement Agreement.

“Stamping an organic label on tobacco products is ultimately a distinction without a difference,” Brown said. “Organic or not, cigarettes are bad for your health.”

Santa Fe said it agreed to make the changes even though “we believe our advertising is, and has been, truthful and not misleading.” The agreement states that the settlement is not an admission by Santa Fe that it has violated the MSA.

Santa Fe said that its organic tobacco is certified through the National Organic Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Certified organic tobacco is grown without the use of pesticides and fertilizers prohibited under the program. The agreement allows it to continue to advertise its tobacco as organic or 100 percent organic.

“We came to an amicable agreement, and there was no fine involved,” said Alexandra Pratt, a spokeswoman for Santa Fe. “It made sense to make the agreement, which adds more clarity, which is what the California attorney general wanted.”

Santa Fe said it is sending new marketing materials to distributors and retailers. They have to be in place by March 23.

By Richard Craver, Journalnow

Cigarettes host a bacterial bonanza of hundreds of different germs, including those responsible for many human illnesses, a new genetics study reports.

The data support findings described last September by scientists at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. They extracted tobacco particles sitting atop filters or inside cigarette packaging and placed the particles in a sterile culture medium that simulated human lungs. In most cases, the team was able to grow bacteria that had been present on the near-microscopic flakes.

Scientists have long known that smokers and people exposed to secondhand smoke experience high rates of respiratory infections, notes Amy Sapkota of the University of Maryland in College Park. The presumption has been that smoking impairs lung function or immunity — which it may, she acknowledges.

“But nobody talks about cigarettes as a source of those infections,” she says. So she and her colleagues screened leafy bits of cigarettes for bacterial DNA.

The scientists probed for ribosomal material, protein-building elements that read and execute instructions encoded within a cell’s DNA. Sapkota’s team homed in on long, species-specific regions of this material known as 16S markers and compared them with those of known bacteria.

Checking 16S markers for close to 800 known bacteria revealed matches to many hundreds of markers in the four brands of cigarettes screened: Marlboro Red, Camel, Kool Filter Kings and Lucky Strike Original Red. All were purchased in Lyon, France, where Sapkota was completing postdoctoral studies.

In a paper published online in Environmental Health Perspectives, Sapkota’s team lists many of the most prevalent bacteria present, including Campylobacter, which can cause food poisoning; Clostridium, Corynebacterium, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia — all of which are associated with pneumonia and other infections; E. coli; and a number of Staphylococcus species that underlie serious hospital-associated infections.

Such genomic analyses can’t prove whether the DNA in unlit cigarettes came from live germs. But Alejandro Rooney of the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Ill., says that, based on data he published five years ago, at least some could have.

In seeking the source of severe respiratory disease in some U.S. troops in Iraq, most of whom were new smokers, “We looked at the microbes that you could culture from cigarettes and that were alive,” Rooney says. Most bacteria belonged to families that form spores. “And that makes sense,” he says, because tobacco in cigarettes is dry.

And spore-forming bacteria like Bacillus subtilis can survive in a state akin to suspended animation until they reach a suitable environment.

Clearly, he says, “it would be worthwhile to investigate further whether it [bacterial contamination of tobacco] is a health problem” and whether it extends to microbes beyond those his team was able to culture.

Roswell Park immunologist John Pauly agrees.

Several years ago, he began exploratory “surgery” on cigarettes, looking for microbes. Eighteen months ago, his group published data showing that randomly selected flakes extracted from cigarette filters and packages grew in a solution mimicking blood.

In the September 18, 2009 issue of Immunological Research, Pauly and his colleagues reviewed data showing that not only cigarettes but also cigars and smokeless tobacco (such as chewing tobacco and snuff) host live germs, although in most cases, few to none of the microbes have been identified by species.
In the paper, Pauly’s group also summarized followup tests at Roswell Park. They showed that roughly 60 percent of filters — representing 11 brands of sampled cigarettes and five companies — contained tobacco particles. The tobacco also hosted bacterial toxins. And as a general rule, they reported, “bacteria grew from greater than 90 percent of the randomly selected flakes.”

When cultured with blood, Pauly’s team demonstrated, “those tobacco-derived bacteria frequently destroyed the red blood cells.”

Ironically, he says, “You’ll see very few bacteria on freshly harvested, green tobacco.” Most microbial contamination occurs later. “When you place it in a curing situation, for example — a barn with high temperatures, high humidity, poor ventilation and blocked-out sunlight — you get a near-perfect environment for growing bacteria and fungi,” Pauly says.

Pauly notes that the tobacco industry is well aware of microbial contamination in their products, and when it occurs, even though they have yet to report it in the peer-reviewed literature. His source: a host of U.S. patents awarded to cigarette companies in recent years for killing microbes.

They include patent no. 6,755,200 B1, issued on June 29, 2004, to three Virginia scientists on behalf of Phillip Morris Inc. It covers the use of an antibacterial wash on fresh or partially cured tobacco as a cost-effective method “of reducing both the numbers and activity of bacterial and fungal populations.” The patent points out that these microbes are responsible for producing endotoxins and tobacco-specific chemicals called nitrosamines.

Preventing nitrosamine formation is the real impetus for those patents, says Pauly, because those contaminants represent “the number one carcinogens found in both smoking and smokeless tobacco products.” And they don’t arise from the burning of tobacco, he notes, “but due to microbial degradation of components in the tobacco.”
However, endotoxins are not benign. Healthy lungs are sterile, Pauly notes, so seeding the airways with microbes and these toxins could promote dangerous inflammation and “constitute a previously unrecognized health risk from smoking.”

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, signed into law last June 22, gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration the power to compel companies to turn over all data on constituents of tobacco products that may be harmful. This would include germs, Pauly contends. The law also instructs the FDA to publicly display and annually publish a list of potentially harmful constituents in each tobacco product, by brand and by quantity. And it directs the FDA to report to Congress on innovations and treatments that would, among other things, reduce the harm associated with tobacco use.

Pauly says that he and other tobacco researchers “are hoping FDA uses the law to start asking tobacco companies: ‘Why have you withheld this information from us for so long, and when will you start using the [antimicrobial] technologies you’re patenting to reduce the harm associated with tobacco products?’ ”

By Janet Raloff, Sciencenews

The 2008 WI Youth Tobacco Survey found that 7 percent of high school students and 3 percent of middle school students use chewing tobacco. Its use is more common among boys than girls.
With the numbers doubling in the years from middle school to high school, it is very important that our youths are educated about chewing tobacco, its effects on their bodies, and the products and advertising aimed at them by the tobacco companies.

Many people have the incorrect assumption that because chewing tobacco is smokeless, it is also harmless, since the poisons and chemicals are not released into the air. However, that is not the case. Chewing tobacco contains 28 cancer-causing agents, all of which are absorbed into the bloodstream during its use. In fact, chewing tobacco is more addictive and harder to quit than cigarettes. Using spit tobacco eight to 10 times a day can put as much nicotine into the body as smoking 30 to 40 cigarettes, since the nicotine content of spit tobacco is two to three times greater than a single cigarette. Nicotine is more addictive than cocaine or heroin (“About Spit Tobacco,” ETR Associates, 2007).

With the smoking bans that are being implemented around the nation, tobacco companies are changing the focus of their advertising — turning more to promotion of smokeless products as discreet alternatives to cigarettes in places where smoking is not allowed (www.cancer.org). This is creating a new tobacco user — one who smokes in their home, and uses smokeless products in public, posing even more serious health threats to their bodies.

Additionally, the smokeless products that the tobacco companies are advertising have an increasing appeal to teenagers, due to the variety of candy flavors that are available. A recent study by Portland State University Chemistry Professor James Pankow found that smokeless tobacco products have up to 700 percent more flavor additives than candy! The high levels of flavorings are used to cover the taste of the tobacco, luring kids into using it because of the good taste, and not forcing them to think about the health risks associated with its use.
Anti-tobacco advocates state that parents who don’t smoke are not aware about the new threat coming from smokeless flavored tobacco, as they simply have no idea that such products exist. The landmark Tobacco Control act adopted last June, and put into effect in November, prohibits the sales of cigarettes with any flavoring besides menthol; however, the ban doesn’t cover other flavored tobacco products.

Chewing tobacco users face a multitude of health risks, including cancers of the lip, tongue, cheeks, gums and floor and roof of the mouth, nicotine addiction, oral leukoplakia, gum disease and gum recession, heart attack and stroke . According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, oral cancer is the sixth-leading cancer in men, and almost 75 percent of people diagnosed with oral and pharyngeal cancer use tobacco. Additionally, only 56 percent of people diagnosed with mouth or throat cancers live longer than five years.

Feb. 14 to 20 was Through With Chew Week. Established in 1989 by the American Academy of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery Inc., the week serves as an educational campaign to decrease spit tobacco use and increase awareness of the negative health effects of using these products . Locally, our Youth Initiatives group organized a number of events to increase awareness of the dangers associated with chewing tobacco. These kids have taken a stand to not use tobacco products, to educate their peers about the risks associated with the use of tobacco and to fight against the tobacco companies and their deceptive marketing practices. Join the kids in their efforts: Educate yourself about the dangers of chewing tobacco, and consider developing an action plan to quit if you are a current user.

Wendy Young is a Marshfield Clinic AmeriCorps Member serving the Inner Wisconsin Coalition for Youth (IWCFY), working on prevention activities with students in the local schools, including Wisconsin Rapids public and parochial, Immanuel Lutheran, Nekoosa, Pittsville and Auburndale. IWCFY is a network of community members promoting and facilitating healthy lifestyles.

Asthma is the most common chronic illness affecting Latino children in the United States, and secondhand smoke is a serious contributing factor. Now a new study from The Miriam Hospital’s Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine and Brown University suggests that clinically-based smoking cessation programs may not be enough to help Latino smokers with asthmatic children kick the habit.

In the study, Latino parents with an asthmatic child were more likely to quit smoking when they received a culturally-tailored intervention that provides feedback about how much secondhand smoke their children were exposed to, compared to parents who followed existing smoking cessation clinical guidelines. Researchers say these findings reinforce the importance of educating parents about how their own smoking can affect their children with asthma.

The study appears in the February issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in a special edition focused on smoking cessation in underserved populations and innovative treatments. It is the first study to target smoking cessation in Latino caregivers of asthmatic children.

“Caregivers who continue to smoke despite their child’s asthma need an intervention that not only provides feedback about the harmful effects of cigarette smoke on themselves and their child, but also factors in their cultural values and readiness to quit,” said the study’s lead author, Belinda Borrelli, PhD, of The Miriam Hospital’s Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine. “Our findings suggest that standard smoking cessation clinical guidelines alone may only have limited success with this population.”

Borrelli, who is also a professor of psychiatry/human behavior at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, adds that they targeted Latinos specifically for the study, given that 16.5 percent of Latinos smoke yet few smoking cessation programs have been developed specifically for the country’s largest minority group. Meanwhile, asthma – which is exacerbated by secondhand smoke – is much higher among Latinos than other racial or ethnic groups.

Overall, asthma has now become the most common pediatric chronic illness in the United States, affecting an estimated 4.8 million children. More than half of American children under the age of 5 live in homes with at least one adult smoker, placing them at greater risk for a variety of illnesses, including asthma. Research has shown that these children take more asthma medications and use emergency services more frequently than asthmatic children who are not exposed to secondhand smoke.

Investigators identified 133 Latino smokers who were caregivers of a child with asthma. These caregivers were randomly assigned to receive one of the two smoking cessation interventions delivered in the home by a bilingual Latina health educator: a behavioral action model (BAM) and a precaution adoption model (PAM).

The BAM followed clinical guidelines that focus on problem-solving and building coping skills to help smokers who are ready to quit. Meanwhile, the PAM was intended to help parents better connect their smoking to their child’s health by providing physiological feedback about cigarette smoke exposure. It was also designed to be consistent with the values of Latino culture, including the importance of family, communication and intimate relationships.

In addition to measuring carbon monoxide levels of parents in the PAM group, the research team also assessed children’s secondhand smoke exposure by placing two nicotine monitors in the home for one week. They then mathematically converted these smoke levels into “cigarette equivalents,” telling parents, “Your child was exposed to as much smoke as if she/he smoked “x” number of cigarettes him/herself the week that the sampler was placed.”

Overall, secondhand smoke levels in the homes of both groups were measured at the beginning of the study and after three months, and parents’ smoking status was assessed at the end of the study as well as at two-months and three-months post-study. According to investigators, approximately 28 percent of participants in the PAM intervention had quit smoking three months after treatment, compared to about 18 percent of those receiving the BAM intervention. Significant decreases in asthma-related illness were only observed in the children of participants in the PAM intervention.

“Theory-based treatments that have been effective in other areas of behavior change can be successfully applied to smoking cessation interventions,” said Borrelli. “In addition, the integration of smoking cessation into well-accepted interventions like asthma education can help us proactively reach smokers who might not spontaneously seek help to quit smoking or who do not have ready access to primary care or preventive health services.”

Overall, the study group was mostly female and included a range of Latino ethnicities, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central American, South American, Mexican and Cuban. More than half of the children of participants had been to the emergency department in the previous year and/or had been hospitalized for asthma. Although parents did not have to want to quit smoking in order to participate in the study, they all received a quit smoking self-help manual and an optional eight weeks of nicotine replacement therapy, along with the home visits and phone calls from the health educator.

Defining special populations of smokers

Borrelli, who served as editor of this special issue of the journal, also authored a lead introductory article about next steps for special populations research and innovative treatments for smoking cessation. In it, she offers the first definition of “special populations” of smokers, classified as those who have at least a 10 percent higher smoking prevalence than the general population, have disproportionate tobacco-related health disparities, lack access to effective treatments, and are understudied in terms of longitudinal treatment trials. In addition to racial and ethnic minorities, this includes young adults with cancer, people with psychiatric disorders, and homeless individuals.

The article breaks new ground by providing eight criteria to determine whether evidence-based cultural adaptations are justified for smoking cessation treatment. For example, if the target population differs from the general public in terms of rates and patterns of smoking, burden of tobacco-related diseases, predictors of smoking behavior, or treatment engagement, then it may be necessary to tailor the intervention for that particular group. Borrelli also outlines the four phases of cultural adaptation – data collection, treatment modification, pilot test and outcomes – in order to standardize the process.

The current study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Co-authors included Elizabeth L. McQuaid, PhD, and Bruce Becker, MD, both of Rhode Island Hospital and Alpert Medical School; Scott P. Novak, PhD, of RTI International; and S. Katharine Hammond, PhD, of the University of California at Berkeley.

Medicalnewstoday

Tobacco, once a multi-million dollar crop in Richmond County, is on a serious decline based on participation in a referendum taken earlier this month.

“We actually did not have any participants in the program,” said Paige Burns, interim county extension director. “Did that surprise me?”

Taylor Williams, agricultural extension agent from Moore County and former director of the Richmond County extension office, said that a little over 10 years ago Richmond County had more than 50 tobacco farmers.

“As recently as 1997, tobacco was a $6 million or $7 million crop in Richmond County,” Williams said. “It’s still raised, but by very, very few people.”

“There’s less than a handful for sure (tobacco farmers),” Burns said. “Definitely a decline from when I started.”

According to Burns, the issue isn’t that tobacco farms across the state are on the decline, but rather that farmers have moved from out of the county.

Tobacco production in North Carolina has actually risen over the past five years, although the majority is grown east of I-95, Williams said.

Since the tobacco buyouts this past decade, producers began selling product through larger companies which in turn devalued the tobacco from $1.93 a pound, to $1.50. Likewise, on average it costs a farmer approximately $3,600 to care for and farm an acre of tobacco, according to Williams.

The return for the farmer is around $3,700.

Farming tobacco in Richmond County is not as cheap as it once was and nearby counties can farm the same crop, but for much less because aquifers are closer to the surface and there is a better market.

Flue-cured tobacco is traditionally what local farmers grew.

With the rate of tobacco exports on the rise, the referendum put to a vote the continuation of an assessment of one-fifth of one cent per pound to pay for export promotion programs.

“This is a way to provide funding historically to help Tobacco Associates move product in a foreign market,” Burns said. “There’s a higher exportation outside the United States (than domestically).”

Two-thirds of the eligible voters participating in the referendum needed to mark their ballot in favor of the program to continue.

The statewide numbers were not available.

Flue-cured tobacco is what sells overseas, primarily in a Japanese market, Williams said, but flue-curing is what makes it so expensive for Richmond County farmers.

Burley tobacco has been toyed with locally. It is cheaper and easier to grow, but the burley market is still small.

“It’s every bit as traumatic to tell a tobacco farmer to start a new crop,” Williams said about farmers turning to alternative crops like soybeans or peaches.

For a farmer to begin a new crop, it generally takes three years to turn around a profit after supplies are purchased and the plants are grown.

A press release from Tobacco Associates, Inc. says the reason for the referendum is that U.S. domestic consumption continues to decline so the future of tobacco production in the country will depend on growth opportunities in the export market.

By Bryan Stewart

Smoke Free Movies has launched a series of print advertisements in several publications. This advertisement first ran in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety on January 12, 2010.

One White House adviser on counter-terrorism said Sunday there was no “smoking gun” that would have alerted authorities to the plot to blow up a U.S. international flight on Christmas Day, but admitted “human error” and “system lapses,” rather than deliberate concealing of information, enabled a terror suspect with explosives strapped to his body to board the aircraft.

“There is no smoking gun,” said John Brennan, the assistant to the President for homeland security and counter-terrorism, in a CNN program, adding: “There was no single piece of intelligence that said, ‘this guy is going to get on a plane.’”

He said that the security breakdown in the failed bombing of the Northwest Airlines flight last month was different from the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States.

“It’s not like 9/11,” Brennan said, adding that the “system didn’t work as it should have”. There were some “human errors.” There were some “lapses” that should be corrected. “But day in and day out, the successes are there,” he said.

The Obama administration is under fire after a 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab–who U.S. authorities say was linked to al Qaeda–was able to board the Delta/Northwest flight from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Detroit, with explosives tucked in his underwear.

Brennan, who is currently heading a government investigation into the case, also clarified that the United States was not opening a new front against al-Qaeda in Yemen–where the al-Qaeda branch in the Arabian Peninsula that claims to have trained and equipped the Nigerian bomber is based–and had no plans to send troops there either.

“I wouldn’t say we’re opening a second front. This is a continuation of an effort that we had underway, as I said, since the beginning of the (Obama) administration,” he reportedly told another TV program on Fox News.

He said the U.S. was not going to let al-Qaeda continue to gain in Yemen, but would take necessary steps to protect Americans there as well as elsewhere abroad.

Brennan also said that U.S.-born Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, was trying to incite terrorism and that he was linked to both the shoot-out at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas November 5, and the December 25 plot.

“Awlaki is a problem. He’s clearly a part of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. He’s not just a cleric. He is, in fact, trying to instigate terrorism,” he said.

The U.S. official said there were indications that Awlaki had direct contact with Abdulmutallab and that he was also in touch with U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the accused gunman in the November 5 mass-shooting at the Fort Hood base.

Virginia is spending about 1.5 percent less on tobacco-prevention programs in the current fiscal year, according to a report by a coalition of public-health groups.

And other states are cutting funding for the programs overall by more than 15 percent this year, pushing it farther than ever below federally recommended levels, the report said.

Virginia’s spending on the programs, including federal funding, is about $13.4 million, down from $13.6 million in 2009.

That spending represents more than 4 percent of the estimated $307 million in tobacco-generated revenue Virginia collects each year from tobacco-settlement payments and tobacco taxes, according to the report.

Virginia ranks No. 32 on tobacco-prevention spending, committing about 13 percent of the minimum amount recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I am concerned that Virginia ranks so low,” said David DeBiasi, director of public advocacy for the American Lung Association of Virginia. “The impact of teen smoking on future health-care expenses, after they have developed cancer or emphysema, makes an investment in prevention not only a logical step but a necessary, fiscally sound decision.”

Under legislation passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1999, the state puts 10 percent of its payments from the national tobacco settlement into youth-smoking prevention, but lawmakers have shifted some of that money in subsequent years to help balance the state budget.

Also, state legislators this year added childhood-obesity prevention to the mission of the foundation that oversees the smoking-prevention program, raising concerns among tobacco-control advocates that smoking-prevention programs will lose funding.

All states, including Virginia, should spend $567.5 million of their own money and $62 million in federal grants on programs to prevent tobacco use — about 17 percent of the $3.7 billion, the Centers for Disease Control recommends, the report says.

Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia trimmed funding for such programs this year. New York cut the most at $25.2 million, or 31 percent, the report said.

States will collect more than $25 billion in a combination of tobacco taxes and legal settlements from the tobacco industry this fiscal year. They will spend about 2.3 percent of that on programs to prevent or stop tobacco use, the report says.

Released by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and several other groups, the report says smoking-related health care costs $95.9 billion annually nationwide.

Tobacco companies agreed in 1998 to settle lawsuits several states brought over smoking-related health-care costs by paying them about $206 billion during a two-decade-plus period.

The largest U.S. tobacco company, Henrico County-based Altria Group Inc., parent company of Philip Morris USA, pays a majority of that amount. Altria spokesman David Sutton said states should use more of the settlement money for youth-smoking prevention and health-related initiatives.
December 10, 2009

A 2009 survey of 11,000 Vermont students in eighth through 12th grades found a change in attitude about the risks of smoking and marijuana that worries state health officials.

In the Department of Health’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey two years ago, 72 percent of Vermont school-age teenagers said they believed there was “great risk in people harming themselves” from smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day. In this year’s survey, the percentage dropped to 67 percent.

Likewise, 51 percent of the students saw great risk of harm from smoking marijuana regularly, compared with 42 percent in the most recent survey.

“When we see the attitude more accepting and less perceived risk of harm, we are worried increased use will follow,” said Barbara Cimaglio, deputy health commissioner for alcohol and drug-abuse programs. “The harmful consequences of smoking tobacco and marijuana is a public-health message that must be delivered by parents and communities and understood by young people.”

The state has been conducting surveys of risky behavior among the state’s youth every other year since 1993. The survey asks students about use of bicycle helmets and seatbelts, fighting and abuse, sexual activity and use of contraceptive measures, nutrition and physical activity and whether they talk to their parents.

The changing view about the harmfulness of smoking reverses a 10-year trend in which more and more students saw risks in tobacco use.

The percentage of youth who smoke has remained at 16 percent since 2003 but had declined precipitously from 38 percent in 1995. Officials don’t want to see that trend reversed, Cimaglio said.

The survey found 22 percent of all students had used marijuana at least once in the past 30 days, down from 32 percent in 1997 — another trend officials would like to see continue rather than reverse.

Cimaglio noted two other disturbing indicators in the survey, although the data had changed little from 2007. Nearly one quarter of the students reporting riding in a vehicle with a drinking driver, and a nearly equal percentage said they had been in a vehicle when someone who had used marijuana was behind the wheel.

The imbibing or marijuana-smoking drivers could be parents or friends, Cimaglio noted. Regardless of who it is, the worrisome behavior “is something we want to focus on,” she said.

The Health Department plans a campaign in the spring to spotlight “how parents can support their children in making good choices,” Cimaglio said. The campaign will include radio and Internet messages along with initiatives developed by community organizations. The effort will be paid for under a $12 million, five-year federal Strategic Prevention Framework grant.

The campaign will build on some strengths identified in the survey, Cimaglio said, citing the fact that 77 percent of the students reported they talked with their parents, and 72 percent reported eating meals with their families at least three times a week. “Those are really protective factors,” she said.
By Nancy Remsen
November 29, 2009

Cigarettes are a clear public health problem. A significant number of people who smoke regularly throughout their lives will develop serious health problems including lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema. And for 30 years now, governments around the world have worked to change people’s attitudes toward smoking. Indeed, when I visited Tunisia in early November, they pointed out that 2009 was designated as a year-long anti-smoking campaign.

There are two classes of measures that have been taken to fight smoking (and related public health problems like alcohol and unhealthy eating). One is to make smoking less attractive in the short-term to counteract the positives of smoking. The other is to provide warnings about the dangers of smoking.

As I have written before in previous entries, one reason why smoking is so difficult to quit is that it provides some pleasure in the short term (and for the addicted smoker also the absence of painful cravings). The health risks are in the long-term and so they have a weaker pull over current behavior. Thus, measures like making it illegal to smoke indoors in public places and raising the price of cigarettes through taxes are aimed at decreasing the pleasure of smoking in the short term.

SmokersThe other major public health initiative is to influence the information that is available about smoking. For example, in the US, there are very few venues in which cigarette manufacturers are allowed to advertise, and so there are few positive messages about smoking in mainstream media. In addition, by law, cigarette packs have to come with a warning about the dangers of smoking.

A paper by Jochim Hansen, Susanne Winzeler, and Sascha Topolinski in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology examined the effectiveness of these warnings on the attitudes of smokers toward smoking.

The authors reasoned that there are two kinds of smokers. Some smokers find that smoking is an important part of their self concept. They are truly smokers. Other people smoke cigarettes, but that is not an important part of their self-concept. They do not identify strongly as smokers.

There are also two kinds of warnings that are often given about smoking. Some of those messages are about the negative social consequences of smoking. For example, a warning might point out that “Smoking makes you unattractive.” Most of the warnings that actually appear on cigarette packs tend to focus on the danger of death associated with cigarettes, issuing warnings like “Cigarettes are dangerous for your health” or “Cigarettes cause lung cancer.”

In other posts, I have discussed the idea of mortality salience: that being reminded of your own mortality can affect your self-esteem. Hansen and colleagues reasoned that a cigarette warning that highlights that cigarettes may cause death could actually backfire. When someone identifies strongly as a smoker, then a warning that focuses on mortality can threaten that person’s self-esteem. Because they identify strongly as a smoker, the easiest way to boost their self-esteem is to increase their favorable attitude toward cigarettes.

To test this hypothesis, a number of cigarette smokers were tested. Some of these people were ones for whom smoking was an important part of their self-concept, while others were ones for whom smoking was not that important to their self-concept. The smokers read either a warning that talked about how smoking decreases a person’s attractiveness or a warning that talked about how smoking causes death. Later, these people rated their attitude toward smoking.

As these researchers predicted, if people thought smoking was an important part of their self-concept, they rated smoking as much more attractive if they read a warning that focused on death than if they read a warning focused on attractiveness. That is, for the group of smokers whose identity is bound up with smoking, the kinds of warnings that are typically shown on cigarette packs actually backfire.

This research suggests the importance of gathering evidence about programs that relate to the behavioral aspects of public health problems. On the surface, nobody could oppose big warnings on cigarettes that trumpet their health risks. However, we must be careful, because these warnings could actually do more harm than good.

By Art Markman
November 24, 2009, Psychologytoday

The great American Smokeout – a perfect time to highlight new findings that cigarettes are found to be laden with disease causing bacteria. The findings come from University of Maryland environmental health researcher and microbial ecologists at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France whose team found a “wide array” of bacteria in cigarettes that can harm human health.

According to Professor Amy R. Sapkota who led the research, “We were quite surprised to identify such a wide variety of human bacterial pathogens in these products. The commercially-available cigarettes that we tested were chock full of bacteria, as we had hypothesized, but we didn’t think we’d find so many that are infectious in humans.”

Sapkota says the bacteria found in cigarettes are believed to survive the smoking process. If so,”then they could possibly go on to contribute to both infectious and chronic illnesses in both smokers and individuals who are exposed to environmental tobacco smoke, so it’s critical that we learn more about the bacterial content of cigarettes, which are used by more than a billion people worldwide.”

Some of the bacteria found in cigarettes are the type found in soil. The study is the first to show there are as many bacteria in cigarettes as there are chemicals.

The researchers studied Camel; Kool Filter Kings; Lucky Strike Original Red; and Marlboro Red cigarettes, finding no difference in the amount and variety of bacteria in the cigarettes.

Cigarettes were found to contain bacteria that cause human infections, including those associated with blood and lung infection (Acinetobacter), a variety of bacteria related to anthrax and food borne illness (Bacillus), and Burkholderia – some of which are responsible for respiratory infections.

A bacteria that causes ten percent of hospital acquired infection in the US, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, was also found in cigarettes, along with Clostridium, and Klebsiella, both associated with respiratory, and other infection. The scientists found “hundred” of bacteria in cigarettes.

The study is the first to show that cigarettes are laden with bacteria, many of which can cause human illness. The research findings have important implications for public health.

Rather than culturing bacteria from small samples of cigarettes, the researchers used DNA microanalysis to find total amounts of bacterial genetic material, uncovering bacteria in cigarettes that could cause infection in humans. The findings that cigarettes are full of potentially harmful bacteria, known to cause disease in humans, arrive just in time for the Great American Smokeout 2009

By Kathleen Blanchard, Nov 20th, 2009