Food and Drug Administration – Page 4

Graphic images influence intentions to quit smoking; study examines the effect of images to appear on cigarette packages

Source: www.newswise.com Author: staff Marketing researchers at the University of Arkansas, Villanova University and Marquette University surveyed more than 500 U.S. and Canadian smokers and found that the highly graphic images of the negative consequences of smoking have the greatest impact on smokers’ intentions to quit. The most graphic images, such as those showing severe mouth diseases, including disfigured, blackened and cancerous tissue, evoked fear about the consequences of smoking and thus influenced consumer intentions to quit. “These results suggest that there appears to be little downside on intentions to quit from using extremely graphic pictorial depictions of the negative health outcomes due to smoking,” said Scot Burton, co-author of the study and marketing professor in the Sam M. Walton College of Business. “Our research shows that strong, negative graphic imagery – and fear evoked from such imagery – influences smokers’ intentions to quit. We also found this to be the case even though recall of the written messages on package labels was reduced by the more graphic images. In other words, smokers were influenced primarily by the images and not by the written message.” Burton, Jeremy Kees and John Kozup, both marketing professors at the Villanova University, and Craig Andrews, marketing professor at Marquette University, developed the study to help officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services better understand what types of pictorial warnings are most effective and why they are effective. These agencies are responsible for implementing the [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-11-14T08:43:19-07:00November, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Dermatologist discusses advantages of vaccines that prevent human papillomavirus and herpes zoster

Source: www.prnewswire.com Author: public release Vaccines have a long history of successfully preventing disease and, in effect, improving the lives of countless Americans. Now, two serious diseases – human papillomavirus (HPV) and herpes zoster – could become a thing of the past as people better understand the safety and efficacy of vaccines to prevent these serious viral infections in specific populations. At the American Academy of Dermatology's Summer Academy Meeting 2010 in Chicago, dermatologist Jeffrey M. Weinberg, MD, FAAD, associate clinical professor of dermatology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, highlighted the significant benefits associated with these two new vaccines. HPV Vaccine Protects Girls and Boys HPV is a group of viruses commonly linked to the sexually transmitted diseases known as genital HPV infection, which have long been associated with the development of cervical cancer, a life-threatening cancer. According to the American Cancer Society's 2010 estimates, approximately 4,210 women will die from cervical cancer in the United States. In 2006, a breakthrough vaccine was approved by the FDA for the prevention of HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18. HPV types 6 and 11 are responsible for more than 90 percent of all cases of genital warts, and HPV types 16 and 18 cause 70 percent of all cervical cancers. Although the vaccine is specifically approved for use in females 9 to 26 years of age, Dr. Weinberg acknowledged that many people are still reluctant to get the vaccination due to a lack of [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-08-29T08:09:12-07:00August, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

FDA analysis finds toxic substances in electronic cigarettes

Source: www.rwjf.org/publichealth Author: staff A preliminary analysis by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) indicates that electronic cigarettes contain traces of toxic substances and carcinogens, contradicting manufacturers' claims that the products are safe alternatives to tobacco, the New York Times reports. According to manufacturers, the battery-powered devices, which produce a vapor that users inhale, contain little more than water, nicotine and propylene glycol, which is used in theatrical performances to create artificial smoke. However, an FDA analysis of the ingredients in two leading brands of electronic cigarettes found that some had detectable levels of nitrosamines, tobacco-specific compounds known to cause cancer. In addition, one Smoking Everywhere cartridge contained diethlyene glycol, a common ingredient in antifreeze that contributed to the death of hundreds of individuals worldwide after it was incorrectly used as a substitute for glycerin in toothpaste. According to the FDA's principal commissioner, the effect of inhaling diethlyene glycol and other carcinogens through electronic cigarettes on the human body remains unknown. The study also highlighted several quality control issues with the electronic cigarettes, which are manufactured in China. For example, nicotine levels varied among cartridges with labels that claimed to contain identical amounts of nicotine, and some cartridges claiming to be nicotine free did contain nicotine. Calling the products drug delivery devices, the FDA says electronic cigarettes should not be allowed in the United States and has rejected approximately 50 shipments at the border since summer 2008. However, vendors in malls nationwide and online continue to sell electronic cigarettes, which [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-07-20T06:49:17-07:00July, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

AACR recognizes one-year anniversary of tobacco law and the additional provisions taking effect today; calls for more research to combat tobacco epidemic

Source: AACR Author: Staff WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Association for Cancer Research recognizes the first anniversary of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which was signed into law by President Obama on June 22, 2009. The law empowered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate the marketing, advertising and manufacturing of tobacco products. Provisions that go into effect today include restrictions on youth access to tobacco products, enhanced warning labels on smokeless tobacco products, and a ban on the use of deceptive terms such as “light” or “mild.” “While most people know that cigarette smoking causes cancer, we need to do a far better job of educating the public about the risks of all tobacco products,” said Margaret Foti, Ph.D., M.D. (h.c.), chief executive officer of the AACR. “In fact, there is sufficient scientific evidence to causally link tobacco use to cancers at 18 different organ sites. For example, smokeless tobacco alone can cause cancer of the mouth, esophagus and pancreas, and new smokeless tobacco labels will help to deliver that message.” Starting today, smokeless tobacco product labels must be larger, and incorporate messages including that smokeless tobacco is addictive and can cause mouth cancer. “With nearly a third of all cancer deaths caused by tobacco use, it is imperative that the research community come together to support the FDA in its efforts to establish a science-based framework for evaluating the harms caused by tobacco products,” said Chairperson of the AACR Task Force on Tobacco and [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-07-04T14:48:08-07:00July, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

The global market for snus and snuff is estimated to be in excess of 1.4 billion cans, and growing. Scandinavia and the US are by far the world’s largest markets for snus and snuff. Scandinavia is a pasteurized snus market, while the US market is dominated by the fermented moist snuff.

Source: The Swedish Match Author: Staff The Scandinavian snus market is comprised of a broad range of brands and product varieties, with pouch products being the most popular and continuing to grow in importance. The largest market in Scandinavia is Sweden, the largest snus market in the world measured in per capita consumption. Norway was the fastest growing market but Travel Retail and the Swedish market also experienced volume growth in 2009. Snus, traditionally a Swedish product, is increasingly being recognized globally as an exciting new market category. This is evidenced by the big tobacco players testing Swedish style snus in chosen markets. During 2009, one of Swedish Match competitors rolled-out snus nationally in the US. Still a very small category in the US, Swedish style snus is considered to have a long term growth potential. Swedish Match is continuing its efforts to assess and develop the market for Swedish style snus in the US market through the marketing of brands such as General. Moreover, through the 2009 joint venture with Philip Morris International, Swedish Match will pursue growth opportunities outside Scandinavia and the US. While still undeveloped, these marketsprovide future growth opportunities. Within the European Union, sales of snus have been banned since 1992. Sweden was exempted from the sales ban for the Swedish market when it became an EU member in 1995. The traditional US moist snuff market has achieved sustained volume growth over the past decade. The US snuff market is comprised primarily of loose varieties in a [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-07-01T10:54:36-07:00July, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Experts: CT scans pose risks, need more regulation

Source: news.yahoo.com Author: Marilynn Marchione, AP Medical Writer From long-term cancer risks to radiation overdose mistakes, CT scans pose a growing danger to the American public and need more regulation to improve their safety, imaging experts write in a leading medical journal. The articles in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine come a week after a story by The Associated Press detailed the overuse of imaging tests and how much the average American's radiation dose has grown in recent years. CT scans are super-sharp X-rays that have transformed medicine by helping doctors quickly diagnose or rule out injuries and diseases. But they use far more radiation than ordinary X-rays, and too much radiation raises the risk of cancer over time. The federal Food and Drug Administration and Congress are considering new measures to help prevent medical mistakes — relatively rare cases where some people are accidentally given radiation overdoses. However, far more people face potential long-term harm from ordinary scans that are done correctly but that are overused, repeated or simply unnecessary. Each year, 10 percent of the U.S. population gets a CT scan, and use of this imaging is growing more than 10 percent per year. "That's really the area we should focus on," said the author of one of the articles, Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman. She is a radiologist at the University of California at San Francisco on temporary leave to do radiation research at the National Cancer Institute. The FDA regulates scanning equipment, but lacks authority to say [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-06-27T10:30:46-07:00June, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Safety features planned for radiation machines

Source: NY Times Author: Walt Bogdanich GAITHERSBURG, Md. — Manufacturers of radiation therapy equipment said at a patient-safety conference here Wednesday that within the next two years their new equipment and the software that runs it would include fail-safe features to help reduce harmful radiation overdoses and other mistakes. The absence of these fail-safe features contributed to the fatal radiation overdose of a New York City patient, whose death was the centerpiece of a lengthy article in The New York Times early this year that examined radiation accidents and how complex new technology contributed to those accidents. Two associations representing the biggest manufacturers of radiotherapy equipment said their equipment — including linear accelerators, which generate high-powered beams of radiation — will shut down if it does not detect that the treatment plan had been checked, that beam modifying devices were correctly placed and that the patient was properly positioned. Most machines are currently configured so that quality-assurance checks are at the discretion of the user, said David Fisher, executive director of Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance, one of the industry groups. The conference, convened by the Food and Drug Administration to discuss ways to reduce radiation overdoses, underdoses and misaligned exposures, was attended by regulators, technicians, medical physicists, doctors and vendors. Several speakers said that articles in The Times about radiation errors, particularly one on the death of Scott Jerome-Parks, a 43-year-old computer programmer, were the impetus for much of the discussion on how to make radiation therapy safer. “The recent attention to radiation dose [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-06-14T19:57:08-07:00June, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Why men’s health is a feminist issue

Source: www.msmagazine.com Author: Adina Nack Jorge (not his real name) feared his girlfriend would dump him. He’d been diagnosed with genital warts before meeting her, and hadn’t yet told her about his infection. Jorge was being careful—no skin-to-skin sexual contact—but the disclosure was looming. So he’d done some research and learned what caused genital warts. Armed with that knowledge, he hoped that his girlfriend wouldn’t reject him, especially since he knew she could be protected from contracting warts “because of the Gardasil vaccine.” It never occurred to Jorge that Gardasil, made by the pharmaceutical company Merck, could also have protected him. But that’s probably because it was only last October that the Food and Drug Administration approved a “male” Gardasil for preventing genital warts. And the FDA has yet to put its stamp on another promising usage of the vaccine for men: preventing cancer, especially highly prevalent oral cancers. Since Gardasil was FDA-approved in 2006, it has received a huge marketing push for preventing cervical cancer in women. It has come into frequent—if sometimes controversial—use for females 9 to 26 years old because it’s designed to guard them, before they ever have sex, against contracting a virus that has been linked to cervical cancer. That virus is HPV, human papillomavirus, which causes one-third of all sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S. Gardasil offers protection against four of the 30 to 40 types of sexually transmissible HPV. While it’s fear of cervical cancer that have motivated young women to get [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-09T21:48:41-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

F.D.A. to increase medical radiation oversight

Source: nytimes.com Authors: Walt Bogdanich & Rebecca R. Ruiz The federal Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it would take steps to more stringently regulate three of the most potent forms of medical radiation, including increasingly popular CT scans, some of which deliver the radiation equivalent of 400 chest X-rays. With the announcement, the F.D.A. puts its regulatory muscle behind a growing movement to make life-saving medical radiation — both diagnostic and therapeutic — safer. Last week, the leading radiation oncology association called for enhanced safety measures. And a Congressional committee was set to hear testimony Wednesday on the weak oversight of medical radiation, but the hearing was canceled because of bad weather. The F.D.A. has for weeks been investigating why more than 300 patients in four hospitals were overradiated by powerful CT scans used to detect strokes. The overdoses were first discovered last year at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where patients received up to eight times as much radiation as intended. The errors occurred over 18 months and were detected only after patients lost their hair. In making the announcement, the F.D.A. said it hoped to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from three medical imaging procedures: CT scans, which provide three-dimensional images; nuclear medicine studies, in which patients are given a radioactive substance and doctors watch it move through the body; and fluoroscopies, in which a radiation-emitting device provides a continuous internal image on a monitor. “These types of imaging exams expose patients to ionizing radiation, a [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-02-09T21:34:45-07:00February, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

FDA clears transoral robotic surgery – developed at Penn –for tumors of mouth, throat and voice box

Source: www.healthcanal.com Author: staff A minimally invasive surgical approach developed by head and neck surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The da Vinci Surgical System (Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Sunnyvale, California) has been cleared for TransOral Otolaryngology surgical procedures to treat benign tumors and selected malignant tumors in adults. Drs. Gregory S. Weinstein and Bert W. O’Malley, Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Department of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery founded the world’s first TransOral Robotic Surgery (TORS) programat Penn Medicine in 2004, where they developed and researched the TORS approach for a variety of robotic surgical neck approaches for both malignant and benign tumors of the mouth, voice box, tonsil, tongue and other parts of the throat. Since 2005, approximately 350 Penn patients have participated in the world’s first prospective clinical trials of TORS. These research trials compromise the largest and most comprehensive studies of the technology on record. “TORS has dramatically improved the way we treat head and neck cancer patients, completely removing tumors while preserving speech, swallowing, and other key quality of life issues,” said Bert O’Malley, Jr., MD, professor and chairman of Penn Medicine’s Department of Otorhinolaryngology:Head and Neck Surgery. “It is very exciting that a concept conceived at PENN, evaluated in pre-clinical experimental models at Penn, tested in clinical trials at Penn, and then taught to key surgeons and institutions both within the U.S. and internationally has been officially [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2009-12-19T23:10:00-07:00December, 2009|Oral Cancer News|