Parents of a Florida teenager who became addicted to Juul have sued Juul, Altria, and Philip Morris USA based on a number of claims, including fraud, negligence, and violation of the RICO statute (the compliant is here). Dr. Stan Glantz and Lauren Lempert provide a nice summary of the reasoning behind the lawsuit and the specific claims being made. The case was filed on Monday in the federal district court for the middle district of Florida.The Rest of the StoryAlthough the main complaint is tha...
A new study published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Medicine reports that there is no association between vaping and cardiovascular disease among never smokers.Like previous studies of its kind, this was a cross-sectional study that examined the association between current vaping/smoking status and ever having been told that one has cardiovascular disease (including heart attack, coronary artery disease, or stroke). Previous studies used data from the National Health Interview...
Somewhere along the line, I must have gone astray. During my masters in public health program, I was taught that one major goal of public health is to educate the public about the risks of various exposures. I was also taught that accurately communicating these risks, as well as helping the public to accurately understand the relative risks between different hazardous behaviors or products was critical.Well, based on an editorial published this morning in the Journal of the American Medical Asso...
Here is my point-by-point response to several of the statements made in the press release issued by City Attorney Herrera announcing the introduction of legislation to ban the sale of all electronic cigarettes in the city of San Francisco: City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Supervisor Shamann Walton today announced joint steps to curb the epidemic of youth e-cigarette use, which has erased more than a decade’s worth of progress in reducing youth tobacco consumption.The “epidemic” of youth e-cig...
Yesterday, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Supervisor Shamann Walton announced that they are introducing an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors that would ban all electronic cigarettes until they are officially reviewed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Since there is not a single e-cigarette on the market that has undergone such an approval process, the ordinance does indeed ban the sale of all electronic cigarettes in the city of San Francisco.The reasoni...
Another crappy study has come along, this one again using cross-sectional data from the National Health Interview Survey to claim that e-cigarette use is associated with a higher risk of having a heart attack, developing coronary artery disease, and having depression.This study, being presented tomorrow (Monday) morning at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans, reports that adults who report puffing e-cigarettes, or vaping, are significantly more likely to have...