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This Week In Health: Put Down The O.J.

This Week In Health: Put Down The O.J.

“This Week In Health” offers some highlights from the world of health news and wellness tips that you may have missed this week:

  • The California state legislature passed a mandatory vaccine bill that could be a game changer. Unlike other public health legislation mandating the vaccination of children, the new bill, which Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Tuesday, makes no exceptions for religious or “sincerely held” personal beliefs — which is to say, nothing the anti-vaxxers can claim will excuse them from vaccinating their children against whooping cough, measles, and other perfectly preventable illnesses. The bill was introduced after a measles outbreak that began in California earlier this year and was largely attributed to the anti-vaccine movement that has a disturbingly strong hold on certain parts of the state.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is cracking down on electronic cigarettes. E-cigs — little suckable pens that vaporize liquid nicotine — have existed in a regulatory limbo since they came into popularity a few years ago. According to the AP, an “uptick in nicotine poisonings reported by emergency rooms and poison centers nationwide, many involving infants and children” has compelled the FDA to consider requiring that vials of liquid nicotine used to refill e-cigs, as well as other non-tobacco nicotine-packed consumables (like lotions, gels, and drinks), use child-resistant packaging and stronger warning language on the labels.
  • Everything is bad for you — including, possibly, citrus fruit. This is according to the results of a study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which found a potential link between malignant melanoma and consumption of citrus fruits. This is because fresh citrus fruits contain furocoumarins, photoactive compounds that can heighten an individual’s sensitivity to the sun. “Until we learn more about these furocoumarins,” said the senior author of the report, “those consuming fresh citrus fruits on a regular basis should be extra careful with sun exposure, and depending on their outdoor activities they should wear appropriate sunscreen, hats, and sun-protective clothing.” The report’s authors cautioned that more research was needed and a single study didn’t prove anything. Furthermore, researchers only asked participants about their intake of grapefruits and oranges — so lemons and limes may still be safe.

Photo: Caitlin Regan via Flickr

E-Cigarettes Should Be Banned For Minors: U.S. Heart Association

E-Cigarettes Should Be Banned For Minors: U.S. Heart Association

Washington (AFP) — E-cigarettes should be subject to the same regulations as cigarettes and should not be sold to minors, the American Heart Association (AHA) said in new policy guidelines out Monday.

The use of e-cigarettes, which are electrical devices that heat flavored nicotine liquid into a vapor that is inhaled, much like traditional cigarettes but without the smoke, has been rising rapidly among youths in recent years, raising concerns about the potential for addiction risks and health damage.

E-cigarettes are currently unregulated, meaning they can be sold to youths and are openly advertised, unlike cigarette-makers which must follow strict rules about where and how their products are marketed.

The AHA guidelines go a step further than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s April proposal, which set out a new series of regulations on e-cigarettes that included banning their sale to minors, but did not restrict advertising or online sales of the candy and fruit-flavored liquids that some say are targeted at young people. A public comment period on the FDA’s proposal ended earlier this month, and the new rules have not yet been implemented.

“Recent studies raise concerns that e-cigarettes may be a gateway to traditional tobacco products for the nation’s youth, and could renormalize smoking in our society,” said Nancy Brown, CEO of AHA.

“These disturbing developments have helped convince the association that e-cigarettes need to be strongly regulated, thoroughly researched and closely monitored.”

The guidelines, published in the journal Circulation, recommend that since e-cigarettes contain nicotine, they “should be subject to all laws that apply to these products.”

The AHA “also calls for strong new regulations to prevent access, sales and marketing of e-cigarettes to youth, and for more research into the product’s health impact.”

The sales of e-cigarettes have risen sharply since they were introduced to the market in 2007, according to health officials.

The number of high school students who tried e-cigarettes nearly doubled, from 4.7 percent in 2011 to 10 percent in 2012, and sales of e-cigarettes could top $2 billion this year, according to industry estimates.

According to Georgetown University pulmonologist Nathan Cobb, the AHA “is right in calling for this minimal set of regulations to be implemented no later than the end of the year.”

He also said more aggressive regulations should follow.

“They can and should be part of a concerted regulatory push to drive towards a tobacco ‘end game,’ which increases the price of combusted tobacco cigarettes while guaranteeing the safety and consistency of e-cigarettes.”

Cobb added that the FDA’s “bare bones regulations” fall short because they subject manufacturers to “significantly less oversight and safety requirements than pet food manufacturers, and are truly a minimum.”

AFP Photo/Joe Raedle

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Study: Electronic Cigarettes Can Be Dangerous, Even If You Don’t Smoke Them

Study: Electronic Cigarettes Can Be Dangerous, Even If You Don’t Smoke Them

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified a new health problem related to electronic cigarettes — the risk that the devices themselves or the liquid nicotine that goes into them will cause injury to eyes, skin or other body parts.

Calls to poison control centers to report problems related to e-cigarette exposure rose from one per month in September 2010 (when officials started to keep track of such calls) to 215 per month in February 2014, according to a report published Thursday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. During that time, poison control centers fielded a total of 2,405 calls about e-cigarette injuries.

To put those numbers into some perspective, the report also notes that during the same period, Americans made 16,248 calls to poison control centers regarding exposure to regular cigarettes. The monthly number of cigarette-related calls varied between 301 and 512.

Electronic cigarettes are battery-operated devices that deliver users a hit of nicotine in vapor form without the carbon monoxide or tars that come from burning tobacco leaves. The CDC estimates that 10 percent of American high school students and nearly three percent of middle school students used e-cigarettes in 2012.

The authors of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report — from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration — found records of 9,839 calls involving either regular or electronic cigarettes that included information on the side effects suffered by victims. Among these cases, 58 percent of calls involving e-cigarettes reported some kind of “adverse health effect.” In 68.9 percent of these cases, people became injured by ingesting something, 16.8 percent by inhaling something, 8.5 percent by getting something in their eye and 5.9 percent by getting something on their skin.

When people were injured by e-cigarettes, the most common side effects reported to poison control centers were nausea, vomiting, and eye irritation. One person committed suicide by injecting the nicotine solution into his or her veins.

By comparison, only 36 percent of calls to poison control centers about regular cigarettes reported an adverse health effect — and in 97.8 percent of those cases, the problems were related to ingestion.

Young children were the ones most likely to be harmed by regular cigarettes, with 95 percent of victims under the age of six. By comparison, 51 percent of those harmed by e-cigarettes were in that age group, and 42 percent of victims were over the age of 20.

“This report raises another red flag about e-cigarettes — the liquid nicotine used in e-cigarettes can be hazardous,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC director and a vocal critic of e-cigarettes, said in a statement. “Use of these products is skyrocketing and these poisonings will continue.”

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report noted that the nicotine liquid used in e-cigarettes comes in flavors such as fruit, mint and chocolate. That could make them especially appealing to children, but Frieden warned that the liquid cartridges are not required to be sold in childproof containers.

DucDigital via Flickr