This week's compendium

Here’s this week’s compendium. This week…

1. Google launched teachparentstech.org whose name says it all [1]. It’s informative. And fun too.

2. the Daily Mail published this article on Israeli airport security’s cutting edge [2a]. Tiny Israel leads the world. H/t The Rubin Report [2b].

3. Grammar Girl explained how to pluralise surnames [3a, 3b]. Important info at this greeting card writing time of the year.

4. Nutrition Diva expounded the benefits of nuts, and also peanuts (which, she said, are legumes and not nuts) [4]. I love peanuts even more now.

5. the Australian Government announced subsidisation of nicotine patches to help smokers kick the addiction [5a]. Good move. The recently released 30th US Surgeon General’s report on smoking documents smoking’s continuing scourge [5b],

6. a treehugger item explained that if 66% of the UK’s shops closed their doors, carbon emission savings would equate to 1.1M fewer cars [6]. I bet they don’t, but.

7. an MJA paper concluded sheepskins are an effective method of bedsore prevention [7]. I wonder if this is the reason the sheepskin price has risen lately.

8. on a sadder note, the floods in south eastern Australia have drowned many southern hairy-nosed wombats in their burrows [8a]. What a tragedy. Southern hairy nosed wombats are a listed endangered species [8b].

Finally, I wish you, dear Farmdoc’s Blog readers, a wonderful week.

Recruiting tobacco addicts the modern way

Tobacco. It’s unclear when Homo sapiens began using it. Maybe as far back as the time of Jesus [1, 2]. Perhaps due to this long time period, it’s remained legal – including since the mid 1950s when it was found to cause lung cancer. (Of course it’s now known to cause many other diseases.) Governments, notably Western ones, have become increasingly concerned by smoking’s adverse health effects – mainly vis-à-vis spiralling healthcare costs. In Australia at least, in recent years governments have legislated health warnings, an advertising ban, more stringent point of sale controls, and smoking bans in public places. If tobacco were a new drug today, it wouldn’t get regulatory approval for public use. Yet governments wouldn’t dare banning the stuff – for many reasons including donations to political parties by tobacco companies, cigarette excise revenue, and a political backlash from millions of tobacco addicts [3]. (Who knows what addictive substances those perverse companies add to tobacco? I don’t.) Like all companies, tobacco companies are intent on progressive growth. So they direct lots of marketing attention to a potential new market, i.e. adolescents (and even children). And a long-term one; lasting at least until cigarettes kill them. But tobacco companies aren’t stupid. Wanting to gain access to young people yet increasingly hemmed in by governments, they’ve hit on a wondrous solution: YouTube [4, 5]. Ho hum.

farmdoc's blog post number 414

The night after Sweetheart Vivienne and I finished watching The West Wing, we began Mad Men. Its website says: ‘Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized and provocative AMC drama Mad Men follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising’. We’ve now finished Season 1 in which the amount of smoking astounded us. It’s incessant. Was smoking that popular in the 1960s? If not, why is it depicted falsely? Or if so, why is it essential to the series that it’s depicted so? And either way, is paid product placement a factor? Though tobacco companies target teenagers because once they’re addicted, they’re life-long customers, little doubt they’ll target adult Mad Men watchers if it’s commercially beneficial to do so. Which is relevant because 31 May – eight days ago – was World No Tobacco Day 2009. To mark it, the MJA published this paper by two Americans who analysed the content of the first 18 seasons of The Simpsons TV show, which aired from 1989 to 2007. They watched 400 episodes and found 795 instances of smoking. I reckon an objective content analysis of Mad Men would document much more smoking. In Australia direct tobacco advertising’s been banned on TV since the 1970s and at sports events since 2006. Currently our smoking rates are among the world’s lowest. Frequent smoking in films and TV programs is arguably the tobacco industry’s response. It’s deplorable.