FDA urged to act on cigarette design

Thirty-three public health and medical organizations are urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make it a priority to regulate how cigarettes are manufactured and thereby stop tobacco industry practices that have made cigarettes even more deadly and addictive than they were 50 years ago, according to a Tobacco-Free Kids press note issued through PRNewswire-USNewswire.

In a letter sent this week to Mitchell Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, the health groups asked the FDA to take action in response to the new surgeon general’s report, The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress, released in January.

The letter is at www.tobaccofreekids.org/content/media_center/2014_03_28_Zeller.pdf.
“The new report found that, despite smoking fewer cigarettes, smokers today are at far greater risk of developing lung cancer than they were 50 years ago, when the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health alerted the nation that smoking causes lung cancer,” the press note said.

“The new report also concluded that this outcome is the result of changes made during that time in the design and composition of U.S. cigarettes.”

The letter apparently said that no manufacturer of any other product would have been allowed to have made product changes that increased the risk of fatal disease to its users.

“It is imperative that [the] FDA respond to the surgeon general’s report by moving decisively to exercise its statutory authority to require cigarette manufacturers to make necessary life-saving changes in the design and composition of their products,” the letter said.