And just in time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has unveiled graphic warning labels for cigarettes:
As graphic as the suggested labels are, they can't compare to the lives that cigarettes and other tobacco products have destroyed. A puff on a cigarette isn't worth permanent disability or death.
The new labels. . .are part of a proposed rule-making. The FDA will accept public comment on the 36 proposed labels, and expects to choose nine of them by June to make final. By Oct. 22, 2012, manufacturers will no longer be allowed to distribute cigarettes for sale in the United States that do not display new graphic health warnings.
Public health officials are hoping that the new labels will re-energize the nation’s anti-smoking efforts, which have stalled in recent years. About 20.6 percent of the nation’s adults, or 46.6 million people, and about 19.5 percent of high school students, or 3.4 million teenagers, are smokers. Every day, roughly 1,000 teenagers and children become regular smokers, and 4,000 try smoking for the first time. About 400,000 people die every year from smoking-related health problems, and the cost to treat such problems exceeds $96 billion a year.
“When the rule takes effect, the health consequences of smoking will be obvious every time someone picks up a pack of cigarettes,” said Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
(Image from FDA)
2 comments:
And yet there is this research on stroke rehab. I won't be taking up cigarettes or patches unless this is truly confirmed and useful for dead brain neuroplasticity.
Nicotine Holds Promise for Stronger Stroke Recovery
http://www.uleth.ca/notice/display.html?b=4&s=3995
What you get with nicotine is the animals with stroke show better recovery and improvement. It speeds things up and you get to a higher level of rehabilitation.
It turns out that nicotine, in contrast to amphetamines, acts in a larger area of the brain and seems to act where the amphetamines don't - in the motor system.
Thanks for the interesting article. That being said, it's a long way from lab rats to people. I think "holds promise" in the title is a little premature. If they could tease out which chemical this helps the lab rats and if that same chemical would work on people - avoiding the deadly side effects - then that would hold some promise.
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