You’ve probably seen people puffing on what look like fat, fancy pens, and exhaling what looks like smoke, then vapor that disappears faster than smoke would. They’re electronic cigarettes-e-cigarettes-that offer nicotine but not smoke, and they’re increasingly popular among smokers who want the pleasure of their habit but not the ill health effects, and those […]
Uncle Sam will rip a page from Big Tobacco’s marketing playbook, targeting the taste and buying-ease of nicotine-containing products with tough new restrictions aimed at better protecting kids. Will these latest steps, however, snuff out the increasingly risky youth vaping craze and long problematic menthol cigarettes and cigars? Or are officials too late and being […]
Big Tobacco has gotten a major kick in the pants over one of its insidious means to hook a new generation on harmful habits. The federal government says it will regulate the booming e-cigarette business, banning sales of the products to those younger than 18 who “vape” and requiring photo IDs for e-cigs’ purchase by […]
Last year, our blog “We Don’t Know Enough About Electronic Cigarettes” outlined how the lack of information about these increasingly popular nicotine delivery systems makes it impossible to determine, among other things, if they help people quick smoking tobacco and what are their side effects for users or bystanders. Now, the FDA wants to scrutinize […]
Consumers, politicians, and federal regulators should not make the mistake of thinking that Big Tobacco somehow will go, as the poet put it, quietly into that good night. The fortunes are still too big to be made in peddling products that persist as some of the greatest preventable threats to Americans’ health, industry players keep […]
The ink was barely dry on statements from the head of the federal Food and Drug Administration about a planned external, independent review of the agency’s tobacco oversight division when one of its top regulators created a personnel stink of his own. Matt Holman, chief of the office of science in FDA’s much-criticized Center for […]
The federal Food and Drug Administration may be putting patients’ safety at serious risk by allowing medical device makers to self-police their products, notably in making crucial determinations in reporting to the agency the severity of harms the devices inflict. Using artificial intelligence techniques to scan a sampling of filings made by makers to the […]
Here’s a glimmer of good health news: It seems that nations around the world may be avoiding what, just a blink ago, was one of the United States’ significant public health concerns — vaping and e-cigarettes. Juul, the San Francisco-based company at the heart of this controversy, has seen doors shut in its face as […]
Big Tobacco not only wrote the playbook on how to deceive the public about the dangers of cigarette smoking, its representatives are adding new pages daily now on how to make electronic or e-cigarettes and so-called vaping seem safe, even when evidence mounts that this isn’t fully true. It’s good to see that the Verge, […]
Tougher ratings for movies targeting teen-agers and higher cigarette taxes may be two good ways to crack down on Big Tobacco’s persistent and harmful peddling of its poisonous wares, health experts say, based on information flowing from the sprawling Golden State. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just assessed Hollywood’s progress in […]
DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog