Food and Drug Administration – Page 6

Senate votes for F.D.A. rules on tobacco

Source: nytimes.com Author: Duff Wilson The Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to impose federal regulation on cigarettes and other forms of tobacco, passing a landmark bill to empower the Food and Drug Administration to control products that eventually kill half their regular users. The Senate legislation has only minor differences from a version the House passed in April. A White House spokesman, Reid H. Cherlin, said that President Obama, who was a co-sponsor of the bill when he was in the Senate, would sign the legislation when it reached his desk. An estimated one in five people in this country smoke, and more than 400,000 of them die each year from smoking-related disease. But for decades, even after the surgeon general’s 1964 report declaring cigarettes a health hazard, Congressional efforts to regulate tobacco had met stiff opposition from lawmakers from tobacco-growing states and their political allies. And when the F.D.A. tried on its own to start regulating nicotine as a drug, the Supreme Court struck down that effort in 2000, saying the agency could not take such a step without Congressional authority. Cigarettes remained less regulated than cosmetics or pet food. But with broad bipartisan support in both the Senate and House, and a campaign pledge by Barack Obama to sign such legislation if he became president, the anti-tobacco forces came into alignment. “This long-overdue grant of authority to F.D.A. to regulate tobacco products means that the agency can finally take the actions needed to protect our people from the most [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2009-06-11T15:34:20-07:00June, 2009|Oral Cancer News|

Oral Cancer Foundation calls for FDA authority over tobacco marketers

Source: Author: The Oral Cancer Foundation today called for the U.S. Senate to grant the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority over tobacco products in response to the tobacco industry's most aggressive marketing campaign targeted at women and girls in over a decade. The U.S. House of Representatives voted to give the FDA such authority approximately two weeks ago. "The percentage of oral cancer patients represented by women has increased tremendously over the past four decades, and we believe the marketing efforts of the tobacco industry is a major causal factor," said Brian Hill, founder of the Oral Cancer Foundation. "Before Virginia Slims began aggressively targeting women in the 1960s, roughly one-in-ten oral cancer victims was female. Since then, the ratio has quintupled to one-in-two." Hill also noted that lung cancer surpassed breast cancer as the number one cancer killer of women in 1987, and that while overall cancer rates are declining for men and women, lung cancer is not declining among women. Moreover, smoking puts women and girls at greater risk of a wide range of other deadly diseases, including heart attacks, strokes and emphysema. Hill cited "Deadly in Pink: Big Tobacco Steps Up Its Targeting of Women and Girls," a comprehensive report recently issued by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The report studied numerous tobacco marketing campaigns, images from which can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org/deadlyinpink. "In reading this report, three [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2009-04-17T08:05:22-07:00April, 2009|OCF In The News, Oral Cancer News|

Smokeless tobacco becomes a target

Source: Winston-Salem Journal (www2.journalnow.com) Author: Richard Craver In bars and restaurants, theaters and stadiums, malls and offices, tobacco manufacturers are trying to reassert their presence in the market with innovative smokeless products such as snus and dissolvable products. "We're meeting the adult tobacco consumer where they are in society today," said Maura Payne, a spokeswoman for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. But health-advocacy groups, having won the day with bans on smoking in most public venues after a 16-year fight, are gearing up their efforts and rhetoric to try to prevent those products from taking root. "These smokeless products are likely to discourage smokers from quitting by sustaining their nicotine addiction in the growing number of places where smoking is not allowed," said Matthew Myers, the executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The evolution of the health-advocacy groups from anti-smoking to anti-tobacco is ratcheting up the moralistic aspect of buying and consuming a legal product. It also is pitting more health-care and anti-smoking officials on both sides of the smokeless debate since it's unclear whether smokeless tobacco equals reduced risk, particularly involving cancer. There have been mixed findings from the few studies that have been conducted on snus. What is clear is that the major U.S. tobacco manufacturers are putting more emphasis on smokeless products, such as snuff and snus, to gain market share and sales as the smoking rate among adults declines. Government figures show that fewer than 44 million Americans smoke, down from a peak of 53.5 million [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-11T13:49:31-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Erbitux aims for first-line head, neck cancer use

Source: www.reuters.com Author: Ransdell Pierson ImClone Systems Inc. on Wednesday said it had asked U.S. regulators for permission to market its Erbitux medicine as a first-line treatment for head and neck cancer. The company's flagship product, which it sells in partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb Corp, is already approved to treat colorectal cancer and patients with head and neck cancer who previously had failed to benefit from chemotherapy. ImClone said it had asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to grant its marketing application a priority review, a designation that would ensure an answer from the agency within six months instead of the customary 10-month review period. The New York-based drugmaker said its application was based on successful results of a late-stage trial involving 442 patients with previously untreated head and neck cancer. The trial showed that Erbitux, when added to current standard platinum-based chemotherapy, significantly increased the overall survival time for patients. Note: 1. Reporting by Ransdell Pierson, editing by Maureen Bavdek

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-09-04T16:24:01-07:00September, 2008|Oral Cancer News|