Newsletter  May, 2003

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S.I. pols rip patches plan?

Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden has been aggressive in his battle to get New Yorkers to stop smoking - even offering them free nicotine patches to help them kick the habit.
But two Republican City Council members said the money used on his nicotine patch program would be better spent on other public health needs, such as nurses for the city's private and public schools.
Funding for the nursing program has been slashed due to budget cuts.
"Your agency found and spent $2.5 million on nicotine patches," Council Majority Leader James Oddo and Council member Andrew Lanza and U.S. Rep. Vito Fossella (R), all from Staten Island, wrote in a letter to Frieden. "It is confounding that your agency found $2.5 million for nicotine when you had testified that you could not afford less than that amount for school nurses."
The Health Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Frieden, who worked with Mayor Bloomberg on the new tough smoking ban, unveiled the nicotine patch campaign when that law went into effect last month.
He promised a free, six-week course of nicotine replacement therapy for the first 35,000 adult New Yorkers who dialed 311. Health officials said yesterday there are a few thousand still available.
On March 30, the city's tough anti-smoking law went into effect, banning lighting up in virtually all workplaces, including bars, clubs and restaurants.
An even tougher state law is set to go into effect in July.

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Study finds online programs effective for quitting smoking

EUGENE, Ore. -- For people who want to quit smoking, visiting Web sites could be as effective as visiting a clinic, a study by the Oregon Research Institute suggests.
The research group found that quit rates for people who participated in a Web-based program were comparable to quit rates achieved in a clinical setting.
A number of Web sites offer smoking cessation services, but no one has ever tried to determine whether they work, said ORI scientist Edward Feil, the study's lead author.
"Is it something we as society want to put our resources toward?" he said. "This study shows it can be effective."
One advantage of Web-based smoking cessation programs is that they "offer the potential to reach into the homes of millions of smokers with a program they can use any time, night or day," he said.
The ORI study, funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute, was published in the current edition of Nicotine & Tobacco Research, an independent, peer-reviewed journal.
Feil and his colleagues created a smoking cessation Web site to test ways to recruit smokers and help them quit. They listed the site on major search engines, such as Yahoo and Lycos, placed newspaper ads, distributed brochures and generated news coverage.
They enrolled 606 people in the program and followed the first 370 who enrolled for a three-month period. At the end of three months, they tracked the people down via e-mail and snail mail and offered them $10 or $20 if they completed a survey.
The survey measured changes in their smoking habits, and asked their opinion on different elements of the Web site.
Of the 209 who responded, 67 said they hadn't smoked for at least seven days, for a quit rate of 32 percent. When the nonresponders were counted as smokers, the quit rate dropped to 18 percent.
The results point to the need for more study of Web-based stop-smoking programs, Feil said. But getting reliable study results from the Web is a challenge because of the lack of a control group.
"We cannot conclude that quitting was a function of our Web site, rather than other factors," the researchers wrote.

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Drug to fight lung cancer approved?

WASHINGTON – AstraZeneca Plc's Iressa, the first in a new class of anticancer medicines, won U.S. approval yesterday for treating advanced lung cancer patients who have exhausted other options.
Iressa is a once-a-day pill designed to shrink tumors without the harsh side effects of chemotherapy. Approval in the world's most lucrative pharmaceutical market had been delayed while regulators examined data on patients in Japan who took the drug and died after developing serious lung disorders.
Food and Drug Administration officials said they decided the risks were outweighed by the drug's potential benefits in late-stage lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer deaths.
"Thousands of patients with lung cancer will now have access to an additional treatment after others haven't worked to stop the progression of their disease," FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan said in a statement.
Shares of AstraZeneca, Europe's second biggest drugmaker, rose 3.71 percent to close at $43.05 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Iressa belongs to a new family of drugs known as epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, inhibitors, which aim precisely at cancer cells to block signals that stimulate growth.
The FDA approved Iressa for treating non-small cell lung cancer, the most common form, that has progressed despite treatment with platinum-based and docetaxel chemotherapy, two drugs that are the standard of care for the disease.
In a clinical trial of 216 patients, about 10 percent had their tumors shrink by at least half. The median duration of response was about seven months. "There is a low but real response rate," said Dr. Robert Temple, the FDA's associate director for medical policy.
Certain patients were more likely to respond to Iressa, Temple noted. They included women, people with a type of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma, and people who have never smoked. Lung cancer is almost always caused by smoking, or by exposure to tobacco smoke.
The American Cancer Society estimates that 157,200 patients will die from lung cancer in 2003. About 80 percent of all lung cancer cases are non-small cell lung cancer.
Iressa will be available within two weeks, and the company expects the retail price to be about $1,900 a month, AstraZeneca spokeswoman Mary Lynn Carver said. The wholesale price is $1,560 per month, she said.
Common side effects of Iressa include diarrhea, rash, acne and dry skin.
Two large studies showed no benefit from adding Iressa to standard platinum-based chemotherapy, and the drug is not approved for use in that setting, the FDA said.
With the U.S. approval, Iressa sales could be as high as $1 billion a year by 2007, Sanford Bernstein analyst Catherine Arnold said.

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New lawsuit filed against ‘Big Mo’

May-6 2003. Another lawsuit has been filed in Madison County accusing Philip Morris USA of misleading smokers into believing that light-brand cigarettes are safer than full-flavored brands.

THE LAWSUIT WAS filed Friday, six weeks after the New York-based company lost a record $10.1 billion verdict for deceiving Illinois consumers of Marlboro Lights and Cambridge Lights. That verdict is under appeal.
The new lawsuit seeks class-action status and covers more than 20 Philip Morris brands, including Marlboro Medium, Benson & Hedges Lights, Virginia Slims Lights and Parliament Lights.
John Mulderig, an attorney for Altria Group Inc., parent company of Philip Morris, called the new lawsuit “a carbon copy” of the first one.
He said the only difference between the two lawsuits is the cigarette brands named.
This is why the plaintiff class-action bar in Madison County finds that word processing is their favorite activity,” he said.
On March 21, a judge ordered Philip Morris to pay $10.1 billion after finding that Philip Morris committed consumer fraud in marketing its Marlboro Lights and Cambridge Lights cigarettes as less harmful than regular brands.

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