Charlotte Parker, Author at Oral Cancer News

The global battle over e-cigarettes

Source: SALONPublished: December 26, 2013By: Lynette Eyb, GLOBALPOST FILE - In this Feb. 10, 2013 file photo made with multiple flash exposures, a model pulls on an electronic cigarette backstage before the Chado Ralph Rucci fashion show in New York. New York City is considering legislation that would include electronic cigarettes in the city's ban on smoking in bars, restaurants and other indoor public spaces. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) (Credit: AP) BORDEAUX, France — As more smokers take to electronic cigarettes, the debate about the impact “vaping” — as using the products is called — could have in the fight against tobacco smoking is becoming more acute. On one side, the head of one of Europe’s leading electronic cigarette industry groups has slammed the World Health Organization (WHO) for its lack of support for the booming e-cigarette market. Katherine Devlin, president of the Electronic Cigarette Industry Trade Association, whose members represent some 60 percent of the British market, said the WHO’s reluctance to endorse e-cigarettes is putting millions of lives at risk. “WHO has led a campaign against smoking which has led to the denormalization not only of smoking, but also of smokers, many of whom now feel like social pariahs,” she said in an interview. Vaping, she said, is a cleaner way of ingesting nicotine. “Our hope is that by normalizing vaping, we can help to further underline the message that smokers need to stop setting fire to tobacco sticks and inhaling [...]

Charlotte Parker2014-01-15T17:00:20-07:00January, 2014|Oral Cancer News|

The Trouble With ‘Scientific’ Research Today: A Lot That’s Published Is Junk

Source: ForbesPublished: January 8, 2014By: Henry I. Miller and Stanley Young Many non-scientists are confused and dismayed by the constantly changing advice that comes from medical and other researchers on various issues. One week, coffee causes cancer; the next, it prevents it. Where should we set the LDL threshold for taking statins to prevent cardiovascular disease? Does the radiation from cell phones cause brain tumors? Some of that confusion is due to the quality of the evidence, which is dependent on a number of factors, while some is due to the nature of science itself: We form hypotheses and then perform experiments to test them; as the data accumulate and various hypotheses are rejected, we become more confident about what we think we know. But it may also be due to current state of science. Scientists themselves are becoming increasingly concerned about the unreliability – that is, the lack of reproducibility — of many experimental or observational results. Investigators who perform research in the laboratory have a high degree of control over the conditions and variables of their experiments, an integral part of the scientific method. If there is significant doubt about the results, they can repeat the experiment. In general, the more iterations, the more confidence about the accuracy of the results. Finally, if the results are sufficiently novel and interesting, the researchers submit a description of the experiments to a reputable journal, where, after review by editors and expert referees, it is published. Thus, researchers do the work and, in theory at least, they are [...]

Charlotte Parker2014-01-13T18:07:18-07:00January, 2014|Oral Cancer News|

Are e-cigarettes dangerous?

Source: CNN Published: January 7, 2014By: Harold P. Wimmer http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=EqvlxEQaQnE Editor's note: Harold P. Wimmer is the president and CEO of the American Lung Association. (CNN) -- For the makers of electronic cigarettes, today we are living in the Wild West -- a lawless frontier where they can say or do whatever they want, no matter what the consequences. They are free to make unsubstantiated therapeutic claims and include myriad chemicals and additives in e-cigarettes. Big Tobacco desperately needs new nicotine addicts and is up to its old tricks to make sure it gets them. E-cigarettes are being aggressively marketed to children with flavors like Bazooka Bubble Gum, Cap'n Crunch and Cotton Candy. Joe Camel was killed in the 1990s, but cartoon characters are back promoting e-cigarettes. Many e-cigarettes look like Marlboro or Camel cigarettes. Like their old-Hollywood counterparts, glamorous and attractive celebrities are appearing on TV promoting specific e-cigarette brands. Free samples are even being handed out on street corners. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the promotion of e-cigarettes is reaching our children with alarming success. In just one year, e-cigarette use doubled among high school and middle school students, and 1 in 10 high school students have used an e-cigarette. Altogether, 1.78 million middle and high school students nationwide use e-cigarettes. The three largest cigarette companies are all selling e-cigarettes. Because tobacco use kills more than 400,000 people each year and thousands more successfully quit, the industry needs to attract and [...]

Charlotte Parker2014-01-08T17:59:22-07:00January, 2014|Oral Cancer News|

Why Everyone Seems to Have Cancer

Source: The New York TimesPublished: January 4, 2014By: George Johnson EVERY New Year when the government publishes its Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, it is followed by a familiar lament. We are losing the war against cancer. Half a century ago, the story goes, a person was far more likely to die from heart disease. Now cancer is on the verge of overtaking it as the No. 1 cause of death. Troubling as this sounds, the comparison is unfair. Cancer is, by far, the harder problem — a condition deeply ingrained in the nature of evolution and multicellular life. Given that obstacle, cancer researchers are fighting and even winning smaller battles: reducing the death toll from childhood cancers and preventing — and sometimes curing — cancers that strike people in their prime. But when it comes to diseases of the elderly, there can be no decisive victory. This is, in the end, a zero-sum game. The rhetoric about the war on cancer implies that with enough money and determination, science might reduce cancer mortality as dramatically as it has with other leading killers — one more notch in medicine’s belt. But what, then, would we die from? Heart disease and cancer are primarily diseases of aging. Fewer people succumbing to one means more people living long enough to die from the other. The newest cancer report, which came out in mid-December, put the best possible face on things. If one accounts for the advancing age of [...]

Charlotte Parker2014-01-07T17:34:51-07:00January, 2014|Oral Cancer News|

Fifteen Years after Tobacco Settlement, States Falling Short in Funding Tobacco Prevention: Q&A with Danny McGoldrick

Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Published: December 10, 2013By: Danny McGoldrick On November 23, 1998, 46 states settled their lawsuits against the nation’s major tobacco companies to recover tobacco-related health care costs, joining four states—Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Minnesota—that had reached earlier, individual settlements. These settlements require the tobacco companies to make annual payments to the states in perpetuity, with total payments estimated at $246 billion over the first 25 years. Yesterday a coalition of health advocacy groups released the latest edition of A Broken Promise to Our Kids, an annual report on state use of tobacco funds for tobacco prevention and cessation efforts. As in years past, the report finds that most states fall short in the amount of money they allocate to prevent kids from smoking and to help current smokers quit. The groups that jointly issued the report include the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Lung Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights. Key findings of the 2013 report include: • Over the past 15 years, states have spent just 2.3 percent of their total tobacco-generated revenue on tobacco preventionand cessation programs. • The states this year will collect $25 billion from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 1.9 percent of it—$481.2 million—on tobacco prevention programs. This means the states are spending less than two cents of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. • States are [...]

Charlotte Parker2013-12-11T15:05:35-07:00December, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

Katie Couric show on HPV vaccine sparks backlash

Source: CBS NewsPublished: Thursday, January 5, 2013By: Ryan Jaslow Katie Couric’s talk show "Katie" has drawn ire from doctors and journalists for a recent segment on the HPV vaccine that presented what it called “both sides” of the “HPV controversy.” The segment included personal stories from two moms who claim their daughters suffered serious harm from the vaccine (one of them died). In addition, the show featured two physicians: one who researched the vaccine and thinks its long-term protection benefits are oversold, and one who recommends it to her patients, in line with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Ahead of the show, which aired Dec. 4, Couric tweeted: Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, did not feel it was appropriate to juxtapose the anecdotal stories with the medical evidence. He had hoped more weight would be given to the scientific evidence of the vaccine’s safety profile and effectiveness at preventing cervical cancer. “The show was kind of inexcusable in terms of damage done versus positive contribution,” he told CBS News. Any time you’re vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people, Caplan said, you can expect that some people in that population will have health incidents occur. But their ailments may not necessarily be connected to the vaccine. What needs to be weighed is the cause and effect, versus what may be just coincidence. Mentioning such incidents in that [...]

Charlotte Parker2013-12-06T14:41:54-07:00December, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

Four Ways Katie Couric Stacked The Deck Against Gardasil

Source: ForbesPublished: Wednesday, December 4, 2013 This afternoon, Katie Couric ran a long segment on her daytime talk show, Katie, about what she called the “controversy” over the vaccines against human papilloma virus, or HPV, an infection that causes cervical, throat, penile, and anal cancers. She featured one mother who says that Gardasil, the HPV vaccine made by Merck , killed her daughter, and a young woman, seated with her mother, who said that Gardasil had caused years of illness that made her think she might die. (GlaxoSmithKline GSK +0.15% makes another HPV vaccine, Cervarix, that is less commonly used in the U.S.) Alongside those stories, Couric also featured two medical experts: Dr. Diane Harper, the chair of family and geriatric medicine at the University of Louisville, who helped test Gardasil but has since argued that the vaccine has been over-marketed and its benefits oversold; and Mallika Marshall, a Harvard Medical School doctor who is Couric’s in-house medical correspondent. Marshall defended the vaccine; strangely, only her arguments appear on the show’s Web site. Despite the attempt at balance, I think most viewers will be left with the impression that the vaccine is dangerous and that its benefits don’t outweigh its risks – a conclusion that is not shared by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Here’s how Couric stacked the deck against the HPV vaccine: 1. By downplaying the effectiveness of [...]

Charlotte Parker2013-12-05T13:18:37-07:00December, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented

Source: The New York TimesBy: Steve Lohr http://youtu.be/Kn9OJy1BPDo Vaccination programs for children have prevented more than 100 million cases of serious contagious disease in the United States since 1924, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The research, led by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of public health, analyzed public health reports going back to the 19th century. The reports covered 56 diseases, but the article in the journal focused on seven: polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough. Brian Snyder/Reuters (It won’t hurt a bit.) Researchers went back over health reports and measured the drop in disease after a vaccine was introduced. Researchers analyzed disease reports before and after the times when vaccines became commercially available. Put simply, the estimates for prevented cases came from the falloff in disease reports after vaccines were licensed and widely available. The researchers projected the number of cases that would have occurred had the pre-vaccination patterns continued as the nation’s population increased. The journal article is one example of the kind of analysis that can be done when enormous data sets are built and mined. The project, which started in 2009, required assembling 88 million reports of individual cases of disease, much of it from the weekly morbidity reports in the library of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then the reports had to be converted to digital formats. Most of the data entry — 200 [...]

Charlotte Parker2013-12-09T15:35:05-07:00November, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

Cancer Prevention Research

Clinical and biochemical studies support smokeless tobacco's carcinogenic potential in the human oral cavity Source: American Association of Cancer ResearchPublished: November 9, 2013By: Susan R. Mallery, Meng Tong, Gregory C. Michaels, Amber R. Kiyani, and Stephen S. Hecht Abstract In 2007, International Agency for Cancer Research presented compelling evidence that linked smokeless tobacco use to the development of human oral cancer. While these findings imply vigorous local carcinogen metabolism, little is known regarding levels and distribution of Phase I, II and drug egress enzymes in human oral mucosa. In the study presented here, we integrated clinical data, imaging and histopathologic analyses of an oral squamous cell carcinoma that arose at the site of smokeless tobacco quid placement in a patient. Immunoblot and immunohistochemical (IHC) analyses were employed to identify tumor and normal human oral mucosal smokeless tobacco-associated metabolic activation and detoxification enzymes. Human oral epithelium contains every known Phase I enzyme associated with nitrosamine oxidative bioactivation with ~2 fold inter-donor differences in protein levels. Previous studies have confirmed ~3.5 fold inter-donor variations in intraepithelial Phase II enzymes. Unlike the superficially located enzymes in non-replicating esophageal surface epithelium, IHC studies confirmed oral mucosal nitrosamine metabolizing enzymes reside in the basilar and suprabasilar region which notably is the site of ongoing keratinocyte DNA replication. Clearly, variations in product composition, nitrosamine metabolism and exposure duration will modulate clinical outcomes. The data presented here form a coherent picture consistent with the abundant experimental data that links tobacco-specific nitrosamines to human oral cancer. [...]

Charlotte Parker2013-11-25T17:22:35-07:00November, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

Incidence of oropharyngeal cancer on the rise

Source: News-Medical.netPublished: November 22, 2013 NCI scientists report that the incidence of oropharyngeal cancer significantly increased during the period 1983-2002 among people in countries that are economically developed. Oropharyngeal cancer occurs primarily in the middle part of the throat behind the mouth, including the base of the tongue, the side and back walls of the throat, and the tonsils. The results of this study, by Anil K. Chaturvedi, Ph.D., Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI, and his colleagues, appeared online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Nov. 18, 2013. Recent studies from several countries have reported rising incidence of oropharyngeal cancers and subsequent studies have shown the human papilloma virus (HPV) as the potential cause. However, it has been unclear whether this increase in oropharyngeal cancer incidence represents a global phenomenon. Chaturvedi and his collaborators at Ohio State University and the International Agency for Research on Cancer evaluated incidence trends for oropharyngeal and oral cavity cancers. Their analysis was based on cancer registry data from more than 180,000 patients in 23 countries. They found that oropharyngeal cancer incidence increased overall among both women and men from 1983 to 2002, almost exclusively in economically developed countries. Among women, in all countries with significant increases in oropharyngeal cancer incidence, there was also an increase in incidence of both oral cancer and lung cancer, two cancers strongly associated with smoking. In contrast, among men, rising oropharyngeal cancer incidence was generally accompanied by decreases for oral cancer and lung cancer. These observations among [...]

Charlotte Parker2013-11-22T14:42:00-07:00November, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

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