Hard to argue in favor of smoking in clubs

It's not easy for a politician to defend smoking but Eagle River Assemblyman Bill Starr will be doing just that next week. Starr has proposed a repeal of the smoking ban for private clubs. The Assembly will take comment Tuesday night. The change would affect 20 or so clubs -- mostly veterans and fraternal organizations -- but it is really aimed at just one: the Eagles Aerie 4174 in Peters Creek.

The Eagles Aerie, which has 187 members, is located in Starr's district. The aerie has been resisting the smoking ban since it went into effect in 2007 and has had at least two run-ins with the Alcohol Beverage Control Board. The aerie would like to operate an indoor smoking room, separated from where the bartender works by a wall and a door; the room would have outside ventilation. Starr's proposal would make that legal.

Bishops push smoking ban in church premises

Three Catholic bishops have given their support to the anti-tobacco campaign and considering banning smoking within church premises in their dioceses. Bishops Arturo Bastes of Sorsogon, Jose Oliveros of Malolos, and Honesto Ongtioco of Cubao said they are concerned about the secondhand smoke and its effect on children.

 “I am absolutely in favor to ban smoking even at the church premises, plaza, compound or patio. Smoking inside (the Church) is already banned,” said Bastes. "I would highly recommend or favor the banning of smoking inside and outside church premises for a friendly and healthy atmosphere or surrounding," Ongtioco, for his part, said. Smoking is being linked to illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, as well as chronic respiratory diseases like emphysema and diabetes.

 “It is good policy to ask people not to smoke within church premises. Smokers do not only harm their health but others as well. It is also harmful to the ecology with the cigarette butts being thrown anywhere," Oliveros said. Ongtioco and Oliveros earlier also favored the additional taxes on “sin products” such as cigarettes and alcoholic beverages as a way to discourage consumption.

Lung cancer CT scans: Just for older heavy smokers

New lung cancer screening guidelines from three medical groups recommend annual scans but only for an older group of current or former heavy smokers. The advice applies only to those aged 55 to 74. The risks of screening younger or older smokers or nonsmokers outweigh any benefits, according to the guidelines. About 8 million Americans would be eligible for screening under the new criteria, and if all of them got the scans, about 4,000 lung cancer deaths per year could be prevented, said Dr. Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

He chaired the expert panel that wrote the new guidelines for the American College of Chest Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The recommended screening involves low-dose CT scans, which are a special kind of X-ray that can detect lung cancer early, but also can have false-positive results. Regular chest X-rays can also detect lung cancer but they provide less detailed images than CT scans, can also have false-positive results and have not been recommended as a screening tool because they have not been shown to save lives. The guidelines were published online Sunday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. An estimated 226,000 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year. It is the leading cause of cancer deaths for U.S. men and women. An estimated 160,000 lung cancer deaths nationwide will occur this year.

That number has declined in recent years, partly because of better detection and fewer people smoking. Widespread screening will likely lead to some deaths because abnormal results are typically followed by biopsies and other invasive tests that sometimes have deadly complications. Still, the three groups say those deaths would be far outnumbered by people saved from lung cancer deaths by screening. The recommendations go slightly further than preliminary guidance issued last year by the American Cancer Society and targeting current or heavy smokers in the same age range. That guidance said eligible adults "may consider" CT screening but should discuss risks and benefits with their physicians.

The new guidelines say screening with low-dose CT scans should be offered, but only in academic medical centers and other sites with specialized radiologists and surgeons on staff. The guidance is based on a review of evidence including a large National Cancer Institute study involving more than 53,000 people with a history of smoking at least one cigarette pack daily for 30 years or two packs for 15 years. The guidelines recommend screening only for people who have smoked that much. The study is considered the strongest evidence favoring CT screening and also was the basis for the cancer society's guidance and recent similar guidelines from the American Lung Association.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed panel that issues public health guidance, is evaluating that study as it prepares to update its 2004 stance on lung cancer screening. The task force said then that there was insufficient evidence to recommend lung cancer screening with CT scans, X-rays or sputum tests. Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, took part in the new review and said his group likely will issue separate permanent guidelines later this year. The cancer society doesn't issue joint guidelines or endorse other group's guidelines, Brawley said.

"Screening is a double-edged sword," Brawley said. CT screening prevented about 80 lung cancer deaths over six years in the National Cancer Institute study, but 16 study participants died after CT screening, including six who did not have lung cancer. Brawley and Bach expressed concern about heavy marketing by some centers that overstate benefits from CT lung cancer screening and that recommend the scans for low-risk patients. Screening nonsmokers and other low-risk patients "will cause more harm, and yield less benefit for the simple reason that ... they're so much less likely to get lung cancer in the first place," Bach said. Brawley noted that some centers charge at least $300 for these scans, which often aren't covered by insurance, particularly for low-risk patients.

Rochester Hills teen hospitalized after smoking K2

A 16-year-old Rochester Hills boy was hospitalized in serious condition after reportedly smoking a synthetic marijuana called K2, Oakland County Sheriff's deputies report. Deputies were called to the teenager's home in the 36000 block of Samuel to assist medical personnel called to the home around midnight with a combative teenager Friday. The teen had to be restrained and was transported to Troy Beaumont Hospital without further incident, deputies reported.

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 The teen's mother said she had discovered her son had smoked K2 a few hours earlier after an event at Avondale High School. Auburn Hills police have also been advised of the incident by detectives. K2, also known by the street name Spice, is a synthetic herbal mixture which is marketed legally and sold as herbal incense.

When smoked, it can provide a marijuana-type high but has also been known to cause agitation, vomiting, increased heart rates and violent reactions in some users. Two people who have been charged in a recent home invasion in which the homeowner was beaten to death with a baseball bat and two other people attacked and seriously injured were reportedly smoking Spice before the incident.

Study ties secondhand smoke to bladder irritation in kids

Young children between the ages of 4 and 10 were at particular risk from exposure to secondhand smoke. Bladder irritation involves the urge to urinate, urinating more frequently and incontinence. The study revealed that exposure to secondhand smoke is linked to more severe symptoms of bladder irritation: The more exposure the children had, the worse their symptoms became. fresh articles on free tobacco blog(link).

Led by Dr. Kelly Johnson, researchers from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and Rutgers University analyzed survey information on 45 children ranging in age from 4 to 17. All had symptoms of bladder irritation. The researchers divided the children into four groups based on the severity of their symptoms: very mild, mild, moderate or severe. Twenty-four of the children studied had moderate to severe symptoms of bladder irritation, while 21 had mild or very mild symptoms.

The children with moderate or severe symptoms were more likely to have consistent exposure to secondhand smoke, the researchers noted. Of these kids, 23 percent had a mother who smoked and 50 percent of them were regularly exposed to secondhand smoke while riding in a car. On the other hand, the children whose mother didn't smoke and were not exposed to secondhand smoke in the car had only very mild or mild symptoms of bladder irritation. The study was expected to be presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Atlanta.

The data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. "Secondhand smoke is a leading cause of preventable death in the United States," Dr. Anthony Atala, a pediatric urologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and a spokesman for the AUA, said in an association news release. "Beyond conditions such as lung cancer, heart disease and asthma, we now know that smoking has a negative impact on urinary symptoms, particularly in young children. Data presented today should be added to the indisputable evidence that parents shouldn't smoke around their children."

'Ex-smokers are unstoppable campaign' launched

The 'Ex-smokers are unstoppable' campaign was launched this morning in Zebbug by the EU Health Commissioner John Dalli. The aim of this initiative is to help children understand the harmful causes of smoking. Addressing schoolchildren in a playground in Zebbug, Dalli said "I am particularly pleased that more than 165,000 smokers are already actively using iCoach, our interactive smoking cessation tool. iCoach offers support with practical tips and advice as you move through the stages of smoking cessation. More articles read on this blog.

This represents the first time an EU campaign has offered practical help." The EU Health Commissioner added that health awareness starts with education. He noted that despite all the information available, people still hold on to the habit. "I gave up smoking myself some years ago and I know how difficult it can be. I believe that with this new campaign and supporting tool, we will genuinely be able to make a difference to people's lives and help them become 'unstoppable', " Dalli said. Commissioner Dalli also highlighted the success rate of the campaign in Malta, where over 20,000 people have engaged on the campaign's social media tool, while over 1,500 smokers have registered with iCoach, making Maltese take-up rather high above the EU27 average.

 The iCoach is a core part of the campaign, launched in June 2011 across all EU member states, aiming to motivate smokers to stop. Recently, Malta introduced a smoking ban in local playing fields. This measure is being implemented through Malta's local councils with the aim to to ensure a better quality of life, where it comes to smoke-free public spaces. Dalli explained that tobacco is the single largest cause of avoidable death in the EU, accounting for around 650,000 premature deaths per year. "A further 13 million people in the EU suffer from serious diseases caused by smoking.

Even those individuals who do not smoke are affected by smoking and tobacco; second-hand smoke causes 79,000 deaths a year in the EU." The event was also addressed by the Zebbug mayor Alfred Grixti, President of the Southern Region Claudette Abela Baldacchino and the President of the Local Council Association, Michael Cohen. The Director of the Health Promotion Unit, responsible for the national quit line, Dr. Charmaine Gauci, stressed the importance of quitting smoking and also highlighted the various initiatives taken by the Department to support those who want to quit the habit.

IP law probe MPs hunt for smoking gun, find plenty of smoke

Analysis There’s an elephant in the room as Parliament’s inquiry into intellectual property policy rolls on. In the foreground, there’s the role of the officials who are supposed to support it. In the background, there’s something more troubling. Within the past two years - and without a hint, let alone a fanfare - the UK’s economic strategy has radically changed. It favours fashionable new sectors while downgrading successful UK sectors such as design, music and TV, which are based on "intangible" rights. This is not merely a shift in industrial policy; it would appear to be a clear case of government intervening to "pick winners".  More articles about cigarettes, click here.

However, the "winners" here are mayfly internet startups that even the No 10-appointed ambassador to London's Tech City admits won't really create wealth. "Picking losers" might be a more accurate term. It’s a curious silent shift to make because the long-term economic fortunes of the UK – and advanced Western economies – are increasingly reliant on these intangibles for growth. These intangibles, unlike the products of the tangible industries of textile and hardware, cannot be made more cheaply in the emerging economies. Design, copyright, patents, brands and trademarks need to be protected and exploited to the utmost, and we’ll need a lot more of them. MPs may be confronted with more pressing issues such as the eurozone collapse, but surely none looms larger in the long term than the question of: "What will the British economy do?"

 There are two conventional views on where this new stealth economic strategy has come from, and each is as troubling as the other. In one view, rogue civil servants are operating an independent policy beyond oversight or ministerial control. On the other hand, it is official Coalition policy but one that Number 10 cannot explain or even acknowledge publicly: it’s the policy that dare not speak its name. Either way, the view strongly lobbied for by overseas internet multinationals is that for the internet "to win" British rights must be weakened. This emerged in the second evidence session held by MPs in the cross-party group on intellectual property in its current inquiry. Intellectual property: Who needs it?

The first session called on Google and digital rights campaigners to explain their case for weakening the current intangible rights framework by removing protections. The second session heard many cries of incomprehension in response to these changes, and complaints about the conduct of the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and the process of the Hargreaves Review, which looked into the effects of intellectual property (IP) law on Britain's future. But as for the strategy change, whodunnit? Careful questioning didn’t unearth a smoking pistol.

But there was no shortage of smoke. Publishers Association chief Richard Mollet summed up the philosophical shift that has taken place. Instead of treating copyright as the foundation for market-driven growth, copyright was now viewed through a pirate’s eye patch: as just another burdensome piece of red tape. “I feel there’s a chasm, a conceptual chasm, between the view of IP as a property right, which is recognised as such by UK, European and global law – it’s yours, you own it, you can trade off it – versus the other conception of copyright as a regulation, something that trips consumers up, and therefore the less of it there is the better,” said Mollet.

“That’s a gap I don’t think can be bridged, and that view permeates through some IPO thinking.” Hargreaves explicitly endorsed this view of copyright as a burdensome regulation, and it's implicitly now government policy. En route to Hargreaves' report becoming official government policy, nobody had thought to disagree. This rubber-stamping was raised by several witnesses in contrast to the approach of Richard Hooper, who had been appointed to implement the Hargreaves Report’s "Big Idea" – a digital copyright exchange. While Hargreaves had dutifully carried out his homework, witnesses said, Hooper had questioned his task. This suggested the IPO, which wrote much of Hargreaves' report, was carrying out a political assignment.

But reality wasn’t so simple. It may be, one witness suggested, a case of bureaucrats not understanding the industries. Dids Macdonald, of the Anti-Counterfeiting in Design (ACID) group, had spotted more magical thinking. She told the inquiry that officials still thought “design happens by chance”, and isn’t really a skill worth protecting. Officials' obsession with changing copyright appears to downgrade design, she implied. We also heard evidence of bureaucrats taking an activist role, possibly misleading their ministers. “Some evidence was not fed through to ministers,” said Andrew Yeates of the Educational Recording Agency. And the consultation also heard that IPO bureaucrats had been attempting to change international policy before proposals had been discussed, let alone decided, in the UK. This state-within-a-state had its own very active Foreign Office, it seems. 

“For the exception for data-mining, BiS [the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] has been trying to ‘build up a head of steam’ without any evidence for the policy,” said one witness. “The policy is being lobbied in Europe but nobody in the UK has asked whether it’s good for the UK economy.” Mollet also said he’d been in meetings where officials had told him “copyright won’t exist in 20 years”. This is a giddy claim since copyright has survived the invention of electricity and moved beyond copies almost 200 years ago. But it is the kind of thing we can imagine penpushers cheering. It would be interesting to hear which public servant had made this assertion. We also heard how the IPO was "helping" write policy, such as the Hargreaves Review, and then reviewing it. One witness described this as the IPO “marking their own homework”.

There’s another term, coined by blogger Frank Fisher, which is even more apt here: "carousel propaganda". Yeates also noted that officials had downgraded the contribution of creative industries from 8 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent overnight, much to everyone’s surprise. So there’s plenty of evidence of a policy shift – and evidence of prejudices and bureaucratic activism. But not, so far, of where all this originates. Witnesses wanted a stronger representation for intangibles in Cabinet, and were understandably frustrated that declining sectors were strongly represented in Whitehall (manufacturing) but growing sectors (intellectual property) were not. MP Jim Dowd warned the witnesses of getting what they wish for. “People name a department after a problem,” he observed wryly, “and think they’ve solved the problem.”