Tag: tobacco
Trump’s Shady CDC Director Forced To Resign In Disgrace Over Tobacco Stocks

Trump’s Shady CDC Director Forced To Resign In Disgrace Over Tobacco Stocks

Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.

Donald Trump and his administration have already had to face a number of embarrassing ethical issues in just one year, and now there’s one more humiliation to add to his list.

Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, appointed just seven months ago to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been exposed for trading stocks in Japan Tobacco, a multinational cigarette corporation, while simultaneously heading the CDC.

Less than 24 hours after the story broke, Fitzgerald submitted her resignation.

Even before this story broke, Fitzgerald was facing heavy scrutiny for her conflicts of interest that precluded her from fully performing her jobs. She was forced to recuse herself from a wide variety of public health issues, ranging from cancer to the opioid crisis, and had declined to testify to Congress.

This comes at a time when Trump has left hundreds of CDC positions vacantly and proposed billions of dollars in cuts to the agency, even as they struggle to cope with flu season.

Fitzgerald had been appointed to her role by Trump’s former Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, who was forced to resign last September amid allegations he had blown over $1 million in taxpayer money traveling on private jets.

Fitzgerald’s departure isn’t the end of the conflicts of interest at Health and Human Services. The new secretary, Alex Azar, who is overseeing Trump’s supposed effort to reform prescription drug prices, is a former pharmaceutical executive who gouged diabetics for insulin and tested erectile dysfunction pills on children just to block competitors from developing a generic version.

The people Trump and his team have tapped to manage the health and well-being of the American people have been an absolute disaster. We deserve leaders who approach their job seriously and ethically.

Matthew Chapman is a video game designer and science fiction author from Texas. Can be found on Twitter @fawfulfan.

 

Study: Many Teens Who Use E-Cigarettes Also Smoke Regular Cigarettes

Study: Many Teens Who Use E-Cigarettes Also Smoke Regular Cigarettes

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Public health experts fear electronic cigarettes — with their colorful designs and array of sweet flavorings — will induce young people to start smoking. But are those fears justified? A new study from Wales offers mixed results.

Researchers found that 5.8 percent of preteens surveyed said they had used e-cigarettes, and nearly two-thirds of them had tried the battery-powered devices only once. By comparison, fewer than 2 percent of the 10- and 11-year-olds in the same survey had tried regular cigarettes, with about half of them describing themselves as current smokers, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal BMJ Open.

Although the overwhelming majority of kids in this age group had never smoked anything, there was a concerning overlap among kids who had tried electronic and traditional cigarettes. For instance, compared with those who had never smoked traditional cigarettes, those who had were 16 times more likely to have tried e-cigarettes as well. Likewise, the small number of kids who were current smokers were 17 times more likely than their nonsmoking counterparts to have used e-cigarettes too.

Both types of smoking were more popular among an older group of students between the ages of 11 and 16. In this group, 12.3 percent had tried electronic cigarettes and 1.5 percent used them at least once a month. In addition, 12.1 percent had used regular cigarettes, including the 5.4 percent who were current smokers.

Once again, researchers found a link between use of electronic and tobacco cigarettes. Four out of five of those who used e-cigarettes regularly had also tried traditional cigarettes. And compared to nonsmokers, current tobacco smokers were more than 100 times more likely to smoke e-cigarettes as well.

Still, even in this older age group, 43.2 percent of kids and teens who described themselves as regular users of e-cigarettes said they were not current tobacco smokers. And among the kids and teens who had used e-cigarettes just “a few times,” 72.1 percent were not current tobacco smokers.

The study was based on data from two different surveys — one involving 1,601 primary school students who were 10 or 11 years old and another that included 9,055 secondary school students between the ages of 11 and 16.

When all the data was put together, a pattern emerged: Electronic cigarettes were more popular than traditional cigarettes up through the ages of 15 and 16, when the kids were in school-year 11. After that, tobacco smoking became more common.

In school-years 6, 7, and 8 — when kids were between the ages of 10 and 13 — the majority of those who had tried e-cigarettes had not tried tobacco. School-year 9 (ages 13 and 14) was the tipping point, with half of those who had used e-cigarettes at least once saying they had also used traditional cigarettes at least once. Among older teens, the majority of those who had used e-cigarettes had also used tobacco.

One thing seemed quite clear from the data: Teens were not using e-cigarettes to help them kick their tobacco habit. The fact that current smokers were just as likely to use e-cigarettes as were people who had smoked just a few times “indicates that young people are not adopting e-cigarettes as an effective means of quitting tobacco,” the researchers wrote.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo Credit: AFP/Jim Watson

CVS Pulls Last Of Tobacco Items A Month Early, Plans Name Change

CVS Pulls Last Of Tobacco Items A Month Early, Plans Name Change

By Peter Frost, Chicago Tribune

The nation’s number-two drugstore operator has finally kicked the habit.

CVS plans to announce Wednesday that it has pulled all remaining cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco and other tobacco products from each of its 7,700 pharmacies nationwide.

In doing so, the company, long known as CVS Caremark Corp., announced plans to rebrand as CVS Health, a clear nod to the broader role it hopes to play in the health care market.

The move to go tobacco-free, coming a month earlier than planned, carries a substantial risk to CVS’ bottom line, but it also holds the potential for a long-term competitive advantage over its peers, particularly Deerfield-based Walgreen Co., the nation’s largest pharmacy retailer.

“We believe this reflects our broader health care commitment,” said Larry Merlo, the company’s chief executive officer. “What this says about CVS is that we’re a pharmacy innovation company that is at the forefront of a changing health care landscape, and it helps us to play a bigger role in health care.”

The company, the first major pharmacy to undertake such a ban, first announced the plans in February.

CVS estimates that it will forgo about $1.5 billion in annual tobacco sales and an additional $500 million in associated purchases from people who visit pharmacies primarily to buy cigarettes or chewing tobacco.

But, Merlo said, getting out of tobacco clears up a “contradiction” and removes a “growing obstacle” for the company as it pushes deeper into health care.

Eliminating tobacco already has helped with some negotiations, he said.

CVS, based in Woonsocket, R.I., leads the nation with about 900 walk-in clinics, which are staffed to treat minor ailments, administer vaccines and help patients manage chronic illnesses like hypertension and diabetes.

It also has been seeking more partnerships with hospitals, health systems and physicians to manage the health care of groups of patients.

In some cases, such arrangements, which are being adopted by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers, call for groups of providers to share in savings they’re able to produce by keeping patients healthier and their health care costs low.

A care network in which patients would be directed into a pharmacy where they could buy cigarettes while picking up their prescription began to make less sense for some health system executives, said Dr. Troy Brennan, CVS’ chief medical officer.

“This shows them we’re in health care to stay and we’re really serious about managing patient care and population health,” Brennan said.

Like CVS, Walgreen for years has faced criticism from health and advocacy groups over its policy of selling tobacco products. It also is transforming into a more health care-focused company.

Still, its policy on selling tobacco has not changed.

“We believe that if the goal is to truly reduce tobacco use in America, then the most effective thing retail pharmacies can do is address the root causes and help smokers quit,” Walgreen said in a statement. “A retail pharmacy ban on tobacco sales would have little to no significant impact on actually reducing the use of tobacco.”

Both Walgreen and CVS have smoking-cessation programs.

Still, about 18 percent of American adults smoke, a number that hasn’t moved significantly in a decade.

Groups including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and American Lung Association praised CVS’ decision and called on other retailers to follow suit.

“We feel it’s a very important move for a retail pharmacy to take tobacco out of their stores,” said Harold Wimmer, the national president and chief executive officer of the American Lung Association. “We feel this gives us another opportunity to go back to other retail pharmacies and encourage them to do the same.”

AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan

How Kentucky Tobacco Grew A Possible Miracle Drug For Ebola Problem

How Kentucky Tobacco Grew A Possible Miracle Drug For Ebola Problem

When two American aid workers came down with the deadly Ebola virus recently, an experimental treatment materialized seemingly out of nowhere. How did a possible miracle drug for one of the deadliest diseases in Africa come to be grown half a world away in a small town in Kentucky?

Because of chewing tobacco, malaria, Charles Darwin and Australia.

For decades, tobacco has been a solution in search of the right problem, and Ebola might be that problem.

In the 1990s, when smoking rates slipped below 30 percent, Kentucky tobacco farmers began to look for another way to make money. And a lot of eyes turned to Daviess County.

There had always been a lot of tobacco grown in the Owensboro area, including acres of a variety known as “dark air-cured” for Pinkerton, a local chewing tobacco company.

But what was growing there now was different: it would never be smoked or dipped.

A California start-up called Biosource Technologies was paying Daviess County farmers to grow genetically altered tobacco that could produce pharmaceuticals.

One of the first was Rod Kuegel, then president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, the “pool” buyer for unsold tobacco for cigarettes. At the time, burley was still Kentucky’s top agricultural crop, worth more than $840 million.

But Kuegel was keen for a new opportunity.

“We grew a cat vaccine,” Kuegel said last week. Biosource was happy with the results but didn’t want to plant more.

“The man said, ‘The good thing is we got 3 million doses of cat vaccine,'” Kuegel said. “‘The downside is we’ve got 3 million doses of cat vaccine.'”

That was typical of the early stages of the business. Sure, you could do it, but would it make any money?
___

For decades, farmers around Owensboro had been growing tobacco for Red Man, made by Pinkerton. In 1985, as smokeless tobaccos were gaining market share, Swedish Match bought Pinkerton. In the early ’90s, the company built a tobacco research and processing facility in Owensboro to explore the chemical potential of tobacco called the Reserca R&D Station.

Out in Vacaville, Calif., a tech startup company called Large Scale Biology was working on genetically engineering ways to make drugs with plants, including tobacco, which has long been the plant equivalent of the white lab rat.

Tobacco was the first plant to be successfully spliced with foreign genes. Tobacco mosaic virus, so named because of the mottled pattern it produces in tobacco leaves, was the first virus ever discovered and purified.

Large Scale Biology pioneered ways to use the tobacco mosaic virus to get foreign genes into plants, which would then reproduce the desired proteins.

By 1995, a company called Biosource was looking for a way to ramp up production of their experimental drugs, including a vaccine they hoped would fight malaria, so they came to Owensboro. (Biosource would acquire Large Scale Biology in 1999, choosing to keep that name.)

There was widespread interest in using tobacco to produce vaccines and treatments for everything from an antibody to fight tooth decay to an anti-inflammatory protein for use in cardiovascular surgery, along with treatments for orphan diseases — defined by the FDA as conditions that affect fewer than 200,000 people nationwide — cancer, AIDS and infectious threats.

While many companies were experimenting with genetically modified crops such as corn, tobacco — because it wasn’t a food crop — seemed safer and easier.

The technology for pharmaceutical production worked well, but commercializing the process remained problematic. Large Scale Biology had no experience in the arduous and expensive process of getting a new drug through the FDA approval process.

By 2005, the company was in financial trouble. It filed for bankruptcy in January 2006.

“It might be fair to say Large Scale Biology was ahead of its time, and ran out of money before the technology was mature enough,” said Kenneth Palmer, a University of Louisville researcher who worked at Large Scale Biology.

“They laid the groundwork — they had a very innovative group of plant virologists who developed the expression systems to induce plants to make proteins they don’t normally make, like antibodies,” Palmer said. “They developed a lot of the basic technologies currently used today.”

Daviess County farmers are progressive, Kuegel said, and many hoped Large Scale Biology would give them another revenue stream from tobacco, a crop they knew how to grow very well.

They envisioned large fields of bioengineered tobacco that wouldn’t require the same level of expensive manual labor as traditional tobacco.

But the use of a modified version of the tobacco mosaic virus sprayed on plants created new headaches: growers of conventional tobacco worried about gene transfers. And the federal Food and Drug Administration worried about consistency.

The answer was to go indoors to grow everything in a clean environment and keep the conditions tightly controlled. No thunderstorms or droughts, no hail or insect swarms.

But that also meant fewer big fields of tobacco and fewer farmers getting paid to grow it for pharmaceutical companies.

Instead, the company would build an indoor facility the size of a Wal-Mart supercenter with 32,000 square feet of growing space, filled with a totally different kind of tobacco, Nicotiana benthamiana, with its own interesting history.
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In December 1831, when HMS Beagle set sail on a five-year survey of South America, Charles Darwin was aboard as gentleman naturalist. Darwin was a social equal of Capt. John FitzRoy, and they got along. Ship’s surgeon Robert McCormick, who had expected to be the naturalist discovering all the new and interest flora and fauna, became increasingly put out at the favoritism shown Darwin, who got the plum trips ashore while McCormick fumed.

By April, McCormick asked for and received permission to leave; he was replaced by his assistant, the Barbados-born Benjamin Bynoe. Darwin took Bynoe under his wing, teaching him useful collecting techniques. When they arrived at the Galapagos Islands, Bynoe and Darwin camped on Santiago for a week with their servants, gathering fish, snails, birds, reptiles and some insects. Bynoe was there when Darwin began to realize that the species of the various islands were all different; before this, he had not labeled them by island.

In 1836, the Beagle returned to England via Tahiti and Australia, and Darwin went off to study his finds and write the observations that lead to his famous treatise on natural selection, On the Origin of Species.

When the Beagle left the next year to survey Western Australia, which had become a British colony in 1829, Bynoe again went along and this time was both surgeon and naturalist. Somewhere along the northern coast, Bynoe picked up a species of wild tobacco, according to a paper on the history of the plant written in 2008 by UK tobacco genomics professor David Zaitlin, UK plant pathologist Michael Goodin and two other professors at Washington State University and North Carolina State University.

A specimen of this plant wound up in the records of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, where it was eventually named in honor of botanist George Bentham, who described it in his Flora Australiensis in 1868.

Nicotiana benthamiana turns out to have unique characteristics that have made it a darling of modern science.

Because the species developed in isolation, benthamiana has no built-in resistance to much of anything, said Orlando Chambers, director of the Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development center. That makes it easy to infect with the altered tobacco mosaic virus and with agrobacterium, a gene-swapping bacteria that causes tumors in plants.

Modern science also discovered that N. benthamiana, unlike other common research plants, is terrific for a process called “agrofiltration,” in which tissues are flooded with liquid that spreads quickly throughout the entire leaf.

Benthamiana is fast growing but could never survive outside, Chambers said. It is perfect for large-scale indoor growing in soil-free systems, where the plants can be completely controlled.

In Owensboro, the facility also uses automated systems that can infuse whole plants in agrobacterium-laced solutions, which the plants soak up. The agrobacterium carries the foreign genes into the plants, which are then reproduced in bulk. In just a week or two the desired compounds are extracted from the plants.

Since the 1970s at least, tobacco researchers had known the plant could produce copious amounts of chemicals. The problem was finding something worth the effort.

One of Large Scale Biology’s last projects was an individualized “vaccine” for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that would use each patient’s own cancer to create the “cure” and grow it in bulk.

“Sixteen patients enrolled and were given 16 different vaccines, one each,” Palmer said. The goal of the trial was to see if the vaccines were safe, he said. They were, and the outcome was promising. Other pharmaceutical companies are pursuing this avenue of research.

The success came too late for Large Scale Biology, but it proved a tobacco-grown pharmaceutical could be safe. And the speed and relatively cheap cost of the process made it a very attractive option to outside drug researchers, which became the saving grace for the facility.
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As Large Scale Biology was on the verge of going out of business, Kentucky agricultural entrepreneur Billy Joe Miles came to the rescue.

Miles, who has a farm less a mile from the plant, had toured the Owensboro facility as well as Large Scale Biology’s California labs with Gov. Paul Patton, University of Kentucky president Lee Todd and Jim Ramsey, future University of Louisville president.

“I got a call saying the company had gone bankrupt and they were going to close the plant in Owensboro,” Miles remembered last week. He quickly arranged to cover employees’ salaries and keep the doors open while he worked out a plan to save it.

As chairman of the University of Kentucky board of trustees, his first thought was UK, where the Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development Center is located.

But the deal didn’t quite come together, so Miles turned to two other boards with which he was affiliated: the Owensboro hospital and the Kentucky Agricultural Financing Corp., a loan pool set up with money the state got from cigarette makers in the tobacco settlement.

The ag. fund loaned the hospital $3.6 million, and Owensboro Medical Health Systems completed the $6.4 million purchase that spring.

Renamed Kentucky BioProcessing, the facility has become a leader worldwide in commercial-scale production of proteins in plants, often on a contract basis.

In July 2007, KBP began a collaboration with Mapp Biopharmaceutical and Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute to work on Ebola. With a grant from the Army, ASU’s Charles Arntzen and Mapp developed the treatment that was used last week on American aid workers Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol.

KBP also drew the interest of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 2010, following the H1N1 flu scare, DARPA awarded a contract to the Owensboro plant to show that flu vaccine could be made quickly and safely in tobacco plants. Benthamiana could grow the vaccine much faster than other, egg-based vaccine production systems. KBP and similar facilities are primed to grow millions of doses of vaccine for the next pandemic.

“This system would represent a significant alternative in the nation’s ability to protect itself from potential biological threats,” KBP said in a new release last year. “This proof-of-concept program will be focused on influenza, but the system would be adaptable to producing recombinant proteins against other types of pathogens.”

Kuegel, who recently toured the plant with a group of farmers, said the flu vaccine was a crucial hit.

“They created several million doses for the government,” he said. “There’s no facility in the U.S. that can replicate the speed and accuracy that Kentucky BioProcessing can deliver.”

In January, the Owensboro hospital sold KBP to Reynolds American, which is continuing to operate it as a contract bioprocessing facility.

Philip Patterson, president and CEO of Owensboro Health, said the time had come to let KBP go.

“When the board rescued it, they understood the importance of the work going on, work that was still largely conceptual at the time. But the board saw there was promise and value economically for Owensboro,” Patterson said.

“The reason we sold it was we wanted to find the right research partner, a company that could provide significant funding needed to take the next step. Obviously we found that in Reynolds American. They have the expertise at an international level to truly take the work being done at KBP and give it far reaching opportunities. … It’s exciting, and I think there’s more to come.”

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The University of Kentucky also maintains a connection to KBP. Scientists at the Tobacco Researcher center in Lexington are working on improving benthamiana, to “humanize” it so that the chemicals it reproduces are even more compatible.

Palmer now heads the Owensboro Cancer Research Center, a partnership between U of L and the hospital, and is still collaborating with KBP.

Last week, just as Ebola was making headlines worldwide, U of L and Palmer were announcing another major grant, $14.7 million from the National Institutes of Health to develop a gel that would block transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

They will use the tobacco plants to “manufacture” a critical protein from red algae.

The U of L program also has received major grants to develop a cheaper second-generation HPV vaccine to fight cervical cancer and a vaccine for cholera that also could fight colon cancer. All will be grown in KBP’s plants.

So far, only one plant-based pharmaceutical has made it onto the market anywhere in the world — a treatment for Gaucher disease, a rare genetic disorder of the liver — made by an Israeli company using carrot cells.

For Ebola, KBP was preparing for the first human drug trials later this year when the request came to ship doses to Atlanta’s Emory University for the American aid workers. Now, with calls to make the serum more widely available, those efforts may speed up.

If treatment is proved to have helped Brantly and Writebol and if the results can be borne out with further testing, the drug, called ZMapp, may give biopharmaceuticals the big winner it has long needed to attract significant investment.

Photo: Universal Pops via Flickr