Group items tagged

7.2% of women who gave birth in 2016 smoked cigarettes while pregnant, CDC says

About one in 14 pregnant women who gave birth in the United States in 2016 smoked cigarettes during her pregnancy, according to a report released Wednesday.The findings, gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, revealed that 7.2% of all expectant mothers smoked -- but that the percentage of pregnant smokers varied widely from state to state.

In 2011, about 10% of women in the US reported smoking during their last three months of pregnancy, and of those women who smoked, 55% quit during pregnancy, according to data from the CDC's Pregnancy Risk Assessment and Monitoring System.Smoking while pregnant puts a baby at risk for certain birth defects. It also can cause a baby to be born too early or to have low birth weight and can raise the risk of stillbirth or sudden infant death syndrome, according to the CDC.

The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.

if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The secret to Juul's controversial success may be a twist on the age-old story of smoking as an outlet for teenage rebellion. The popularity of Juul seems to grow in tandem with the uproar: Sales of Juul are up more than 700 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen data.

American puffing peaked in 1970, when almost half of all adults smoked cigarettes

“All of our smoking actual tobacco has gone way, way down,” noted Brian Maslowski, an instructor of alcohol, drug and tobacco seminars for Fairfax County Public Schools. The kids he encounters Juuling, he says, are “very much aware of the risks and consequences of smoking.

Modern government office blocks in the Australian capital Canberra have been closed because the air inside is too dangerous for civil servants to breathe.

The sun has glowed an eerie red behind a brown shrouded sky for weeks over Australian metropolitan areas that usually rank high in the world’s most livable cities indexes

It’s an unprecedented dilemma for Australians accustomed to blue skies and sunny days that has raised fears for the long-term health consequences if prolonged exposure to choking smoke becomes the new summer norm. Similar concerns over smoke are emerging in other regions of the globe being impacted by more fires tied to climate change, including the Western US.

But Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have put new pressure on Congress and the White House to reduce racial health disparities. And there are few starker examples than this: Black smokers smoke less but die of heart attacks, strokes and other causes linked to tobacco use at higher rates than white smokers do, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 85 percent of Black smokers use Newport, Kool and other menthol brands that are easier to become addicted to and harder to quit than plain tobacco, according to the Food and Drug Administration

Dr. Gardiner and other public health advocates are particularly concerned about the growing popularity of menthol cigars and cigarillos among Black teenagers. The 2020 National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted by the federal government, found that 6.5 percent of Black students in high school and middle school, smoked cigars and cigarillos compared with 2.5 percent who smoked traditional cigarettes. The F.D.A. says that menthol is the preferred flavor for the cigarillos, which are cheap and mass-produced, unlike premium cigars.

The tobacco industry is in a tricky spot. For several years, the largest companies, Altria and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, now owned by British American Tobacco, have sought to position themselves as transforming their companies into responsible businesses being eager to to preventing young people from smoking and to developing less harmful products. For critics, the industry’s lobbying to protect its menthol brands contradicts that assertion.

Nicotine, vaping helps you to realise, is a pretty pathetic drug. When you strip away the ritual of lighting up and scorching your lungs, you realise that the ritual and the scorching of the lungs were a large part of the appeal.

Which is not to say that vaping isn’t addictive. In fact, I found it far more addictive than smoking because, for all its many faults, smoking is an analogue technology that involves lighting something on fire. This imposes certain inbuilt consumption limits. Smoking sets off smoke detectors and landlords and makes your soft furnishings smell, so you generally avoid doing it indoors. It leaves a foul taste in your mouth and clogs your lungs, so you try not to do it every minute of the day.

This is not true of vaping

Every addition to the increasing number of ways that Americans amuse themselves — D.V.R.s, streaming content on computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon our watches — benefits the lords of professional football. Their game only becomes more valuable as the number of people watching TV programs in real time shrinks

The sole non-N.F.L. event on the 2013 list of the Top 10 most-watched television programs was the Academy Awards broadcast, at No. 7, between two postseason playoff games. The Oscars had 40 million viewers, the Super Bowl 108 million. N.F.L. revenue last year was about $9 billion, but the stated goal of its commissioner, Roger Goodell, in 2010 was to increase that to $25 billion by 2027.

And yet, past the halfway point of the season, the game is as popular as ever. Ratings are up. The N.F.L.'s associated spinoffs, like the sale of licensed merchandise and participation in the fantasy-football phenomenon, continue to grow. The Buffalo Bills, one of the league’s least valuable franchises, recently changed hands for more than $1 billion. The Dallas Cowboys are worth an estimated $3.2 billion.

Smoking, drinking, general poor health: Researchers say these are some of the factors that could explain why more men seem to be dying from coronavirus than women.In countries such as Italy, men represent nearly 60% of people who tested positive for the virus and more than 70% of those who have died, according to the country's National Health Institute (ISS). Even in countries like South Korea, where the proportion of women who have tested positive for the virus is higher than that of men, about 54% of the reported deaths are among men.

But while health officials are starting to take note of these staggering numbers, the United States is not releasing the basic nationwide data that is crucial to understanding who is most vulnerable to the virus, according to a CNN analysis.

But across the countries for which we have data - spanning nearly a quarter of the world's population - we found that men were 50% more likely than women to die after being diagnosed with Covid-19.

At some point you’ll begin to think that the increasing globalization of bad things like climate change and infectious diseases is threatening liberal society.

You’d have a point. At the foundation of classical liberalism is John Stuart Mill’s principle that every individual must be free to speak and act as he wishes “so long as he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself.”

there’s a problem with this formulation: Even in his own time Mill was criticized for drawing a largely artificial distinction between behavior which does and does not impinge on others

Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.

This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.

“And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”

he worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk.

Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution, obesity and consumer debt, so they appear to have delayed the effective containment of Covid-19.

I believe it is no coincidence that these three governments have responded later than comparable nations have, and with measures that seemed woefully unmatched to the scale of the crisis

Napa boasts some of the country’s most expensive farmland, selling for as much as $1 million per acre; a ton of grapes fetches two to four times as much as anywhere else in California. If there is any nook of American agriculture with both the means and incentive to outwit climate change, it is here.

But so far, the experience of winemakers here demonstrates the limits of adapting to a warming planet.

If the heat and drought trends worsen, “we’re probably out of business,” said Cyril Chappellet, president of Chappellet Winery, which has been operating for more than half a century. “All of us are out business.”

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

check this section out from the study he cites: Marijuana intoxication can cause distorted perceptions, impaired coordination, difficulty with thinking and problem solving, and problems with learning and memory. Research has shown that, in chronic users, marijuana's adverse impact on learning and memory can last for days or weeks after the acute effects of the drug wear off. As a result, someone who smokes marijuana every day may be functioning at a suboptimal intellectual level all of the time.

At what point could this not be said of alcohol as well? And yet alcohol is far more addictive, far more related to social problems and violence, and daily drinking of large amounts can be dreadful for the liver (see graph above).

There's also what the study does not analyze: the whole point of marijuana use is to disrupt settled ways of thinking and feeling, to offer a respite, like alcohol, from the deadliness of doing. But for  reasons we don't quite yet understand, marijuana, like other essentially harmless drugs in moderation, can prompt imaginative breakthroughs, creative serendipity, deeper personal understanding, and greater social empathy and connection.

“You shouldn’t be outside! Don’t know you know there’s a ‘shelter in place’?”

Nineteen workers—the first responders to this emergency— narrowly escaped death at the scene of the accident. As the conflagration continued, a towering plume of toxic smoke spiraled up and then over much of downwind Richmond, reaching several other East Bay communities as well.

Chevron fire was judged to be a Level 3 incident, the highest level of danger

Amazon’s tax capitulation is part of a major shift in the company’s operations. Amazon’s grand strategy has been to set up distribution centers in faraway, low-cost states and then ship stuff to people in more populous, high-cost states. When I order stuff from Amazon, for instance, it gets shipped to California from one of the company’s massive warehouses in Kentucky or Nevada.

now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy

Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.

we Americans are waddling toward the moment when calorie counts like the ones at Lenny’s are posted in every chain restaurant across the nation.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, any restaurant in America with at least 20 locations must follow

the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease

As someone who spent a whole career in public health working to reduce tobacco use, I’ve long thought part of the answer to the gun problem is to denormalize gun use and gun ownership. This is what happened in many ways with tobacco, probably the biggest instance being restrictions on smoking indoors, which in addition to protecting innocent bystanders from carcinogens, greatly reduced the social utility of cigarettes and changed the smoker’s image, both to himself and others. (Open carry is the gun equivalent of reversing this process).

I’d like to see some deep thinkers researching how to do that with firearms. It will be hard, given the glorification of guns in so much of society, including mass media, but then, cigarettes once were treated the same way (with the help of paid placement from cigarette makers).

we are not collectively powerless in the face of culture. We know this from the evolution of perceptions of drunk driving, smoking, domestic violence and numerous other de-valorized activities. We reify cultural norms in laws and laws, along with the behaviors they shape in turn, changes culture.

The South Carolina Republican, who roared into Congress in the tea-party election of 2010, has been one of the most partisan, vitriolic and conspiracy-minded legislators in his eight years here. As recently as January, he was demanding answers about a bogus “secret society” within the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe.

Actually, we know exactly what Gowdy is smoking: the sweet herb of retirement. He announced at the end of January that he was leaving Congress, which freed him to speak his mind without fear of a political price

But he was, in his eight years, one of the great GOP flamethrowers. He referred to his lengthy Benghazi probe as a “trial” of Clinton, and after a promising initial hearing, it quickly devolved into a partisan fight that singled out bugbears of the right such as Clinton aides Sidney Blumenthal and Huma Abedin.