PERF Monthly Newsletter – October 2018

OCTOBER 2018

Here is a roundup of the articles, news & updates that we've published on the PERF blog site during the past month. Click on the "Read More" link at the bottom of each excerpt to read the full article.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is busy executing an ambitious anti-smoking campaign to try to give smokers a major push to stop smoking. The question is, what exactly is the damaging activity that is harming people and that must be stopped?

Is it smoking traditional cigarettes, i.e. drawing smoke from burning tobacco into your lungs?

Is it ingesting nicotine, by whatever means?

Is it being manipulated by the tobacco industry, in their ongoing attempt to design, advertise, and sell products to keep you using tobacco in one form or another?

The answer is that it’s kind of all three. In trying to navigate the answers to the questions above, and the weight to be accorded each of the goals that the FDA is taking on, the whole controversy over these different concerns has come to the fore.

…Read the article

The smoking habit kills 7 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization.

A few weeks ago we published an article on the FDA’s efforts to motivate people to either stop smoking, or at least to use products that claim to be less damaging to the smoker.

But might it be more effective to attack the wallets of people who smoke? Would drastically raising taxes on cigarettes deliver a more tangible – even painful – way to motivate smokers to quit?

…Read the article

If you snore, you could have obstructive sleep apnea, and you should mention this to your doctor. Not everyone who snores has sleep apnea, but if your doctor recommends a sleep study, please take it seriously and follow through. Why? Because sleep apnea is not only unhealthy, it’s downright dangerous. In obstructive sleep apnea, breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep. This reduces the oxygen that your brain receives and increases levels of carbon dioxide over and over again. In addition, every time you have such an incident, your brain will sense the problem and wake you up enough to begin breathing again, disrupting your sleep and preventing you from achieving REM sleep, which is the restful stage of sleep that everyone needs to have every night.

…Read the article

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