DC Child Accident & Safety Blog

In response to the increase of smoke-free air laws, one of the nation’s biggest cigarette makers started test marketing flavored tobacco pellets in parts of the country. Although the new product by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, called Camel Orbs, is marketed for adults and packaged in child-resistant containers, critics think it “closely resembles Tic Tac breath mints,” and creates appeal for teenagers, reports Duff Wilson of the New York Times.

According to Wilson, in a study published in the April issue of the Pediatrics journal, researchers say that Camel Orbs and other dissolvable tobacco products are “packed with nicotine and can poison children and lure young people to start using tobacco.” These smokeless products are appealing to teenagers because of their “candy-like appearance, added flavors, and easily concealable size,” says Dr. Laurence Deyton of the FDA in a commentary in the same issue of the Journal. In fact, a group of teenagers were seen sharing Camel Orbs.

Not only do these pellets increase the likelihood of more teenagers becoming addicted to tobacco, their dissolvability and high level of absorbable nicotine also pose health hazards to younger children: children who ingest tobacco products suffer nausea and vomiting.

To combat the emergence of these new products, Congress passed legislation last year to require Reynolds to produce research results and other materials about the dissolvable tobacco products. The FDA is also required under the legislation to study the products within two years; and “depending on the outcome of that review, the agency could ban them or require product changes,” writes Duff Wilson.

Caffeine is technically a drug, although it's hard to think of it like that.

But some experts are saying that, because caffeinated energy drinks promise some of the same effects as prescription drugs, they should be labeled so kids know that anything that produces those effects has to be treated with caution:

Because energy drinks are touted as performance enhancers and stimulants, Dr. Roland R. Griffiths explained in an interview with Reuters Health, kids who use them for these reasons will likely be more open to trying prescription drugs that promise the same effects.

"It seems like it's a pretty easy threshold to step over, but as a society we want to make this a bright line," Griffiths said in an interview.

In their report on the marketing, regulation and health effects of caffeinated energy drinks published this month in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Griffiths and his colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine call for regulations requiring energy drink makers to list the caffeine content of their products on their labels, and warn of the potential for caffeine intoxication.

The whole article merits reading as it contains a lot of little-known information about energy drinks and how they are manufactured and what they contain.

New research from the Harvard School of Public Health shows that tobacco companies have been deliberately varying levels of menthol in their cigarettes, marketing cigarettes with lower levels of menthol to younger smokers and then increasing the level of menthol with the age of the target demographic. From the article:

One document from R.J. Reynolds noted that all three major menthol brands "built their franchise with YAS (younger adult smokers) ... using a low-menthol product strategy. However, as smokers acclimate to menthol, their demand for menthol increases over time."

In 1987, R.J. Reynolds marketed low-level menthol varieties to persuade consumers to switch from regular brands and to recruit new, young smokers, noting: "First-time smoker reaction is generally negative. ... Initial negatives can be alleviated with a low level of menthol."

This new research serves as a reminder that, despite famous regulations about where and how Joe Camel can be displayed, tobacco companies continue to market deadly products to very young people.

Recently, there was an outcry about new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that suggest giving kids as young as 8 years old cholesterol-reducing statin drugs.

Tara Parker-Pope discusses the controversy in a recent column. Those who object to the new recommendations worry about the drugs' long-term consequences, the AAP's financial relationships with drug companies and the possibility that the new guidelines will lead to overuse of the drugs. The defenders argue that the guidelines specify that only a very small group of children--those with strong genetic and lifestyle risk factors--would even be considered for statin therapy. Parker-Pope's whole article is worth reading, as it discusses both the financial and the medical aspects to this debate.

One problem here is widespread throughout medicine: what some have called "indication sprawl." Once a drug or treatment is recommended for one narrow category of patients, it tends to get indicated for more and more categories with less and less testing and justification for the new categories. But more profit for the drug makers.

A smoking cessation program involving four computerized sessions is effective for teens, new research indicates. From the article:

Fritz studied 128 teenagers, 14-19 years old, divided in half for control and experimental groups. The experimental group completed four CASCP computer sessions as well as questionnaires and post-intervention testing. Not only did the experimental group report more quit attempts than the control group subjects, who did not participate in the computer sessions, but 23% of the teens actually quit smoking.