“E-cigarettes” are sublime?

There are lots of reasons people smoke less today. Health is one. Stigma is another.  For some time smoking has lost it’s rebellious allure.

But addictions persist, legal and illegal ones, especially if a multi-billion industries benefit from them. Enter the e-cigarette.

Altria Group rolls out its plans to get into the electronic cigarette market today, and Facebook investor Sean Parker just invested $75 million in e-cigarette giant NJOY. No doubt about it, the e-cigarette market is on fire, reports Marketplace.org.

imgres“At a bar in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, 32-year-old Andy Lee takes a drag from a Puf brand e-cigarette. He started smoking them about six months ago. “I wanted to quit smoking, and I wasn’t ready to do it cold turkey,” says Lee. “Unlike other forms, like the patch or the gum, e-cigarettes still let me have the feeling like I’m smoking.”

“E-cigarettes contain liquid nicotine that turns into a vapor smokers inhale. Lee says e-cigarettes are sold pretty much everywhere now, and a lot of people he knows are starting to buy them.”My friends are slowly ditching regular cigarettes for e-cigarettes,”  he says.   Continue reading ““E-cigarettes” are sublime?”

You’ve not come a long way baby

In 1968, the Phillip Morris Company launched a memorable campaign to sell Virginia Slims, a new brand of cigarettes targeting women, itself a new phenomenon. It had a brand-new slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby.

As a thoughtful piece by Ruth Rosen in today’s edition of Le Monde explains, “The company plastered it on billboards nationwide and put it in TV ads that featured women of the early

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twentieth century being punished for smoking. In all their advertising, smoking was equated with a set of traits meant to capture the essence of women in a new era of equality — independence, slimness, glamour, and liberation

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“As it happened, the only equality this campaign ended up supporting involved lung cancer. Today, women and men die at similar rates from that disease.Still, women have come a long way since the mid-twentieth century, and it’s worth considering just how far — and just how far we have to go.

Once upon a time

“These days it may be hard for some to believe, but before the women’s movement burst on the scene in the late 1960s, newspapers published ads for jobs on different pages, segregated by gender. Employers legally paid women less than men for the same work. Some bars refused to serve women and all banks denied married women credit or loans, a practice which didn’t change until 1974. Some states even excluded women from jury duty.

“Radio producers considered women’s voices too abrasive to be on the air and television executives believed that women didn’t have sufficient credibility to anchor the news. Few women ran big corporations or universities, or worked as firefighters and police officers. None sat on the Supreme Court, installed electrical equipment, climbed telephone poles, or owned construction companies. All hurricanes had female names, due to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society.

“As late as 1970, Dr. Edgar Berman, a consultant to presidents and to Medicare, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency. Few people ran into women professors, doctors, or lawyers. Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs, depending on her marital status, and if a woman needed an abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor.”

 

Complete story at: http://mondediplo.com/openpage/you-ve-come-a-long-way-baby-or-have-you

 

Banning smoking in psychiatric facilities

A few days ago, Worlding.org presented an item about the high prevalence of smoking among people with mental health diagnoses.

Now comes word that the problem has been exacerbated in psychiatric facilities that, unlike most hospitals, routinely tolerate or even encourage smoking. All that is about to change, as the New York Times reports:

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“After decades in which smoking by people with mental illness was supported and even encouraged — a legacy that experts say is causing patients to die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses — Louisiana’s move reflects a growing effort by federal, state and other health officials to reverse course. But these efforts are hardly simple given the longstanding obstacles. Continue reading “Banning smoking in psychiatric facilities”

Bad habits cause more cancer in men

These days men die five years younger than women, typically expiring at 76  as women live to 81. For the longest time the leading reason was heart disease. But now things are changing. As todays’ Guarding reports:

“Men are 35% more likely to die

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from cancer than women, with men’s drinking and eating habits, late diagnosis and advances in breast cancer treatment cited for the stark differential.

An analysis of the most recent UK deaths from cancer found that 202 out of every 100,000 men died from cancer in 2010 compared with 147 per 100,000 women.

“When sex-specific forms of the disease are excluded, such as prostate, testicular and ovarian cancer, the gender gap is even wider, with men 67% more likely to die. And when only working age people are looked at men under 65 have a 58% greater chance of dying than women of the same age. The sexes’ respective likelihood of death varies depending on the type of cancer. Men are almost three times as likely as women to die of oesophageal cancer and almost twice as likely to die from liver cancer.

The figures come from a new report produced by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the Men’s Health Forum (MHF) and the National Cancer Intelligence Network, called “Excess cancer burden in men”, which is published on Tuesday at an MHF conference. It has prompted calls for men to adopt healthier lifestyles and the NHS to do more to spot cancer in men earlier.

“There are a variety of potential explanations for the difference. “The reasons for the increased risk of cancer in men versus women are not completely understood but experts believe that lifestyle is important. Men are more likely to drink alcohol and be overweight, and in the past they were more likely to smoke. All three are significant risk factors for a range of cancer types,” said a separate men’s cancer briefing, produced by CRUK and also released on Tuesday.

“Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, said the stark difference was alarming. He highlighted late diagnosis as a key factor and cited the fact that 24% of men with prostate cancer visited their GP at least three times before their disease was identified, compared with 8% of women with breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Experience Survey. In 2011 CRUK estimated that 45% of all cancers in men could be prevented if men stopped smoking, ate a healthier diet, drank less and weighed less.”

 

For more, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/29/men-cancer-deaths-greater-women