Every day 3,600 children and teenagers start smoking cigarettes, and of those, 1,100 become daily smokers, according to The New York Times. To discourage children from starting to smoke, the Food and Drug Administration recently banned flavored cigarettes, said the Times.
Tobacco companies are producing cigarettes flavored with chocolate, vanilla, clove, and other flavorings, and the FDA banned all of these flavorings because of the potential to entice children to smoke, said the article.
A study done in 2004, found that 17-year-old smokers were three times as likely as those over 25 to smoke flavored cigarettes and they also viewed flavored cigarettes as safer, said the article. These flavors included names like Twista Lime, Kauai Kolada, and Warm Winter Toffee, made by R.J. Reynolds, according to the Times.
Although 60% of children polled said they thought the cigarettes tasted better and were safer, they are as addictive and have the same health risks as other tobacco products, said the FDA. They quoted that 443,000 Americans die prematurely each year because of smoking and exposure to second hand smoke. The FDA said tobacco use causes more deaths each year than HIV, illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders COMBINED.
The FDA has banned the sale of candy, fruit, and clove flavored cigarettes in an effort to curb teen smoking. According to the New York Times, FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg said, “these flavored cigarettes are a gateway for many children and young adults to become regular smokers”. In June President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which went ahead and authorized this move by the FDA.
According to a press release by the CDC in November 2008; Smoking causes at least 30 percent of all cancer deaths each year. This number does not include deaths from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease also known as COPD and the many other health issues smokers encounter . The report also states that about half of all long-term smokers, the majority of whom began smoking as teens, will die prematurely.
A new method of fighting cancer is getting support from some doctors. According to an article in The Boston Globe, doctors are researching how to use the body’s own immune system to fight off cancer cells.
This immune therapy approach is called a vaccine, although it is used to treat cancer, not to prevent it. According to the Globe, experimental vaccines were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting and were targeting prostate, melanoma, and neroblastoma cancers. The Globe article said the doctors at the cancer conference said they had found a vaccine that was able to stop a form of lymphoma from getting worse for more than a year, but they couldn’t predict how long this would last. The researchers are not calling this vaccine a cure for cancer, but a possible option in treatment, according to the article,
The oncologists at the annual meeting described the immune therapy as guerilla warfare, the Globe said. They explained that the body’s immune system has problems identifying cancer cells because the cancer cells are the body’s own cells, not foreign cells like flu cells and so the immune system has trouble recognizing a problem and doesn’t immediately attack the cancer cells, according to the article.
A recent article in the Boston Globe reports that scientists have found that a chromosome in Down syndrome patients has a gene that actually works to starve cancer tumors. Research done by Dr. Judah Folkman at Children’s Hospital in Boston who always wondered by Down syndrome patients seldom developed cancer tumhors has helped lead to identifying the gene responsible, according to the Globe.
The Globe article states that epidemiological studies have shown is that among the 400,000 people in the U.S. With Down syndrome, most never die from solid tumors, although the syndrome increases the possibility of leukemia. The researchers were curious about why people with Down syndrome get fewer solid tumors but more leukemias, according to the article.
According to the Globe, the study published in the journal Nature will help scientists to develop treatments and preventive medications to treat cancer tumors. A researcher named Sandra Ryeom and other researchers have been studying a protein called calcineurin and found a genetic mechanism that acts like an on-off switch for calcineurin and they found that this gene lives in chromosome 21, the same chromosome that is in people with Down syndrome, according to the article.
For more information, go to the National Institute for Health.
Andover Massachusetts attorney Thomas M. Kiley concentrates on legal problems regarding health issues. A recent article in the Boston Globe describes a new approach by cancer doctors to use a patient’s genetic fingerprints to customize new treatment strategies. According to the article, Massachusetts General Hospital may be the first hospital in the US to make gene testing a part of cancer treatment.
Under this new treatment plan, doctors will use robots and lab machines nicknamed John, Paul, George, and Ringo to hunt for 110 abnormalities carried on 13 major cancer genes, that can predict which drugs to use as treatment. The robots can identify genetic characteristics in 5-6,000 patients a year faster than the time-consuming techniques used previously.
