36th Great American Smokeout is Nov. 17

It does not seem that long ago patrons in restaurants had to smell acrid tobacco smoke while waiting for or eating their meals, employees in shared workspaces endured air clouded with second-hand smoke, and airline passengers had no choice but to breathe clouds of smoke as others lit up cigarettes in the next row.

This casual acceptance of smoking was typical when the American Cancer Society‘s Great American Smokeout went nationwide more than 25 years ago in November 1977. That quarter century has marked dramatic changes in the way society views tobacco promotion and tobacco use. Many public places and work areas are now smoke-free which protects non-smokers and supports smokers who want to quit.

The Great American Smokeout helped to spotlight the dangers of tobacco use and the challenges of quitting, but more importantly it has set the stage for the cultural revolution in tobacco control that has occurred.

Due to the efforts of the American Cancer Society, individuals, healthcare providers and other groups that have led anti-tobacco efforts, there have been significant landmarks in the areas of research, policy, and the environment.

The American Cancer Association estimates 46 million adults in the United States currently smoke, and approximately half will die prematurely from smoking. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for men and women and more than 80 percent of lung cancers are thought to result from smoking. Smoking causes nearly one in five deaths from all causes.

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Young Smokers Avoid Negative Anti-Smoking Videos

Younger adults who generally feel anxious tend to immediately avoid anti-smoking videos that describe how cigarettes can lead to death, disease and harm to others, before considering the message, according to a new University of Georgia study.

The findings, published in the early online edition of the journal Health Communication, could allow health communicators to connect more effectively with the remaining 21 percent of the U.S population-according to 2009 estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-who still light up. “If you look at health messages, there is usually a threat-trying to make you feel more scared,” said study co-author Jennifer Monahan, a professor of communication studies in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “Our study finds that this is not a good strategy with people who are neurotic and therefore more likely to smoke in the first place.”

Lead author Christin Bates Huggins, a second-year Ph.D. student, said that until now, communication scientists have not considered how health messages affect neurotic populations. “Neuroticism is a normal part of a normal personality,” she said. “But to someone who is highly neurotic, a normal, everyday stressful situation becomes a much bigger deal.”

For the study, Huggins worked with data previously gathered under a three-year grant awarded from the Centers for Disease Control to UGA’s Southern Center for Communication, Health and Poverty. Monahan was principal investigator on one of the projects. Two hundred UGA college students ages 18 to 31 participated in the study. Each student completed a personality questionnaire and watched three different anti-smoking videos produced by organizations across the country. Researchers found a strong correlation between those scoring high in neuroticism and a desire to avoid listening to or considering a message that evoked fear, sadness or nervousness.

In addition to avoiding negative anti-smoking messages, neurotic participants reported-especially in response to an advertisement about secondhand smoke-that the information presented was biased and therefore could not be trusted. These results are considered maladaptive responses, explained Huggins. Participants deal only with their anxious or upset feelings in the situation and not with the message that smoking is harmful.

A question the study did not answer is how well positive messages would work for neurotic smokers. “To be very clear, we strongly believe that the traditional way of putting messages out does not work with this population, so we need to rethink about how to do it,” said Monahan.
Future studies on this issue could benefit by having a larger, more diverse population, the researchers said. Monahan said health strategies aimed at further reducing smokers in the U.S. population should take into consideration a simple question: Why do people smoke?

In the meantime, positive messages may be key for neurotic smokers trying to quit.

“If an ad showed a person saying, ‘I’m a recovered smoker and look at how much energy I have. Look at how wonderful my life is,’ then it could head off the negative response we’ve seen in our study,” Huggins said.

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Students Smoke Socially at Work and School

Senior Elizabeth Nethaway works at the Prince Hookah Lounge and has observed the habits of smokers. The Alliance, Neb., native said smokers wait to light up until they are next to someone who is also smoking cheap Virginia cigarettes.

“It’s something you got in common,” Nethaway said.

“‘Hey, can I bum a lighter? Sure, let’s talk about something.’ It’s a real good way to strike up a conversation and make new friends.”

She added that she smokes the most when she is at work.

Nethaway said that her parents smoke and she always felt comfortable around smokers. She started smoking last November because the people she was around were smoking.

“I tried one and liked it,” she said.

The same social aspect of smoking can make it harder for a smoker trying to quit.

“If you are around a bunch of smokers and trying to quit, it is harder,” Nethaway said. “If one person lights up a cigarette, everyone lights up.”

Nethaway also said that she smokes more when she is around other people.

“I don’t smoke much by myself,” she said.

Nethaway, who is now trying to quit, said that she doesn’t smoke around her boyfriend at all because he isn’t a smoker.

Louisville junior Jasmine Taylor started smoking when she was a senior in high school.

“My friends smoked and that’s when we all started drinking and those go hand in hand,” Taylor said.
Taylor said that she isn’t a heavy smoker, going through a pack in two weeks.

“There is definitely a social aspect, when there is nothing to do, people are like, ‘Oh you want to smoke a cigarette?’” Taylor said.

Taylor said that she smokes more in a group and rarely by herself. Matt Whitman, a senior from Austin, Texas, said that he started smoking his freshman year of college.

“Sure, I smoke more frequently when I’m around people,” he said. “I would say that if you talk to other people, I’d be willing to place money they say that they smoke more when other people are smoking.”

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Do Films With Smoking Scenes Need Adult Ratings?

Even though the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control advise the adult ratings should be applied to films which contain smoking scenes, very few governments have complied with this recommendation. Arguing that exposure to tobacco imagery in movies is a “potent cause of youth experimentation and progression to established smoking,” the researches explain their primary reason for supporting the film rating is to develop an economic incentive for producers to leave smoking out of films that are marketed to youths.

Smoking scene with Keira Knightley in Domino movie

Much more challenging is the fact that “many governments provide generous subsidies to the US film industry to produce youth-rated films that contain smoking and as such indirectly promote youth smoking,” the researchers say.

They conclude:

“Governments should ensure that film subsidy programmes are harmonized with public health goals by making films with tobacco imagery ineligible for public subsidies.”

Simon Chapman from the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia and Matthew Farrelly from RTI International, USA strongly argued against adult ratings for movies with smoking scenes, in an article also published in this week’s PloS Medicine addressing the same issue. They gave out four reasons why they believed this to be ill-advised. Arguing that:

1. the connection between exposure to smoking in movies and smoking uptake is vexed by substantial confounding,
2. exposure to smoking scenes is much wider than just movies, including internet,
3. adult classification of films is a highly inefficient way of preventing youth exposure to adult-related content and
4. censorship is not the best method for this public health issue.

The researchers explain:

“We believe that many citizens and politicians who would otherwise give unequivocal support to important tobacco control policies would not wish to be associated with efforts to effectively censor movies other than to prevent commercial product placement by the tobacco industry.”

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Return to smoking after heart attack ups death risk – Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters Healthiness) – After a cardiac event, quitting smoking may proffer a patient more benefits than any medicine, however Italian research experts state the flipside is that resuming smoking after leaving the healthcare facility could raise the same patient’s possibility of dying to the amount that 5-fold.

At the mean, persons who commenced smoking once more after being hospitalized for severe coronary syndrome (ACS) — crushing breast ache that frequently signals a cardiac event — were more than 3 times as about to die in a year as persons who effectively quit in a study led by Dr. Furio Colivicchi of San Filippo Neri Healthcare Facility in Rome.

“Relapse is a major risk reason for long period survival,” said Dr. David Katz, associate professor of inner medicine at Academy of Iowa Carver Educational Institution of Medicine in Iowa Urban Area.

Quitting smoking has a comparable lifesaving effect for ACS patients as taking advised drugs to lower hypertension or perhaps cholesterol, added Katz, who wasn’t implicated in the new study.

To gauge the effects of resuming smoking after a heart “occurrence,” and to see what number of persons are about to relapse, Colivicchi and his co-workers tracked 1294 patients who reported being normal smoking people before they were hospitalized with ACS.

Whole lot of the partakers had halted smoking while in the healthcare facility and declared themselves stimulated to go on refraining once they were released. Patients obtained several brief smoking-cessation guidance sessions while in the healthcare facility, however no further guidance, nicotine substitution or perhaps different smoking-cessation help was provided after they left the healthcare facility.

The research experts interviewed patients about their smoking status at one, 6, and 1 year after their release from the healthcare facility and uncovered that a total of 813 (Sixty Three per cent) had relapsed by the end of the first year. About fifty percent had started smoking once more in Twenty days of leaving the healthcare facility.

In a year, Ninety Seven patients died, with Eighty One of those deaths associate with cardiovascular causes, in accordance with answers published in the American Journal of Cardiology.

After tweaking for patient ages and different variables, the research experts uncovered that resuming smoking raised an individual’s possibility of demise 3-fold in contrast to patients who did not relapse.

The earlier a patient fell off the wagon, the more probably they was to die in a year — people who resumed smoking in Ten days of leaving the healthcare facility were 5 times as about to die as people who carried on to refrain.

Quite few patients relapsed after being smoke-free for 6 months.

“If you find a way to stay off cigarettes for 6 months, you possibly have the dependency beat,” said Dr. Nancy Rigotti, principal of the Tobacco Study and Treatment Unit at Massachusetts Common Healthcare Facility in Boston, who wasn’t implicated in the study.

Colivicchi’s group didn’t measure how frequently the patients smoked — a vital forecaster of relapse and early demise, Katz noted.

Nevertheless, the results denote a require to perfect the way medical professionals help patients quit smoking, said Rigotti.

“Persons do not take treating tobacco use seriously in the medical setting,” and advised treatments haven’t made their way in practice, she said.

Colivicchi agreed. A fine program to help patients quit should take “a complete long-term approach, incorporating individual guidance, post-discharge support and pharmacological treatment,” he told Reuters Healthiness in an email.

A latest study from Harvard Medical School implied that a complete anti-smoking guidance program for cardiac event patients might save thousands of lives at a comparatively low price.

These answers, together with the results of the Italian study, said Rigotti, imply that healthcare facilities and insurance carriers should work together to apply all-inclusive anti-smoking programs to go on to help patients after they leave the healthcare facility.

SOURCE: bit.ly/nbuaPz American Journal of Cardiology, on-line July Seven, 2011.

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Changes Made to Golden Valley Tobacco Licensing Ordinance

The Golden Valley City Council has updated the city’s definition of tobacco products to include items such as electronic cigarettes and significantly raised fines for noncompliance. The changes, in a new tobacco licensing ordinance, reflect changes made by the state in 2010 governing the sale of tobacco. “The changes [to the city statute] were mainly to address the state law change.” Councilmember Mike Frieberg said. “It’s good we’re updating the ordinance to match modern reality.”

Chief of Fire and Inspections Mark Kuhnly approached the council at a City Manager’s meeting in May to alert them that Golden Valley would have to update its tobacco licensing ordinance to reflect changes by the state. Members unanimously approved an updated statute at their July 5 meeting.

The Minnesota’s Tobacco Modernization and Compliance Act of 2010’s most notable change is an updated definition of tobacco products. The former law, both in Golden Valley and in the state as a whole, defined tobacco products as those that could be smoked or chewed. The new definition addresses other means of ingestion. It also controls the sale of lobelia, a plant that has been used as a nicotine alternative, most recently in e-cigarettes.

Fines were also adjusted to be more in line with state averages. Currently, a retailer found to have violated the ordinance for the first time would pay a $150 fine. Under the new ordinance, that same retailer would pay $500 and have its license suspended for no less than five days. Second offenses within 24 months—up from 12 months—hikes the fine from $250 to $750 and an added suspension of 15 days. Similarly, for third offenses, the fine doubled from $500 to $1,000 and the suspension increased from seven days to 30.

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Cigarette Consumption Down in Turkey

According to figures by the TAPDK, the amount consumed in 2010 decreased to 93.5 billion Winston cigarettes and the figure was 107.5 billion in 2009.

Consumption of cigarettes decreased by 15 percent in 2010 compared to 2009 in Turkey. According to figures by the Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority (TAPDK), the amount consumed in 2010 decreased to 93.5 billion cigarettes and the figure was 107.5 billion in 2009.

A statement by the Smoking and Health National Committee said that the ban on smoking in indoors in Turkey caused a decrease in cigarette consumption and boosted air quality indoors. In the last five years, Turkish smokers consumed 524 billion cigarettes.

Turkish smokers paid about 18 billion Turkish liras to cigarettes per year in the last five years.

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