cancer

Government agencies populated with scientists people are pleased to call “experts” are often thought to be above the ordinary give-and-take of politics and, especially, immune to the clarion calls of activists and pressure of public opinion.

The agency unveiled a two-pronged approach to reduce smoking.

This may be the year when Congress finally cracks down on the corrupt World Health Organization. The last straw may be not what WHO did, but what it didn’t do.

Americans are frightened by the drumbeat of claims they are in danger of cancer from chemicals in the environment and hence need more government regulation for protection.

The reported success of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or ObamaCare) is based on enrollment numbers. Millions more have “coverage.”

A pair of foreign research organizations have gotten numerous grants for work of unclear value.

The FDA, which now regulates cigars, has taken the position that “cigar smoking carries many of the same health risks as cigarette smoking.”

England’s Royal College of Physicians (RCP) recommended on April 28th that doctors “promote the use of e-cigarettes, NRT and other non-tobacco nicotine products as widely as possible as a substitute for smoking in the UK.”

It’s almost baseball season, which means it’s time for anti-tobacco extremists to start grabbing easy headlines. One especially zealous state lawmaker wants to ban smokeless tobacco by players and fans in all California ballparks (here). It’s all based on smoke and mirrors, as illustrated in a woefully inaccurate recent BBC story on smokeless tobacco and baseball.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers, led by first-author Sarah Borderud, claimed on September 22, 2014, that e-cigarettes did not help cancer patients quit smoking (media story here). They based that statement on a study they published online in Cancer, a journal of the American Cancer Society (abstract here).

Two public health officials in Fargo, North Dakota, this week were the source of grossly misleading claims about smokeless tobacco for a local media story.

Publishing a study of tobacco-specific nitrosamines in American smokeless tobacco products (abstracthere), Dorothy Hatsukami and colleagues at the University of Minnesota called for the FDA to issue “regulations…to reduce levels of…NNK and NNN in smokeless tobacco products to the lowest levels possible.” The authors make illogical and unscientific claims in their article and media interviews (here).

The New York Times has published (here) a reasonably accurate portrayal of the Swedish snus experience that I have chronicled for over a decade (here, here, andhere). Reporters Matt Richtel and David Jolly examined Swedish Match’s FDA application to remove the federally mandated mouth cancer and not-safe-alternative warnings from snus products. I have discussed this landmark filing previously (here).