Packaging is a huge part of a product’s appeal and cigarette packs are no different. The coloring, branding and imagery helps to attract customers, especially kids.
That’s why the recent unveiling of large, graphic health warnings that will be mandatory for all cigarette packs sold in the U.S. is a huge deal. And the Food and Drug Administration is asking the public to weigh-in on the 36 proposed warning labels. They are “testing the waters” on the proposed rule, and will use comments, research results and scientific findings to pare the list down to nine images, to be implemented for good by Fall of 2012.
The comment period ends January 11, 2011, and it’s important we end up with the strongest images and warnings possible and that we let the FDA know how important implementing the proposed rule is to preventing the toll of tobacco use. The proposed warning labels will cover 50 percent of a cigarette pack and will portray some of smoking’s negative health effects. They include statements like “Warning: Tobacco smoke can harm your children.” Another is “Cigarettes cause cancer,” next to a sore-studded mouth.
The warnings will be the first major change to cigarette packaging in decades.
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When Republicans talk about health care rationing, they are almost always hoping to equate it (erroneously) to health care reform. But in Arizona, Republican rationing has led to the denial of life-saving treatments — and has resulted in another death.
As reported in The Arizona Republic, a second transplant candidate has died because they were denied coverage after Governor Jan Brewer slashed funding for the state’s Medicaid program for organ transplants.
Hospital officials say that the budget cuts were to blame for the patients death. “We believe that it’s likely that they died because they were unable to get a transplant,” a University Medical Center spokesperson told the paper.
This is the second patient to have died since Brewer pulled the plug on certain transplants in Arizona’s Medicaid program, the Health Care Cost Containment System. Patients that were covered by the state and waiting for a transplant were cut from the program effective October 1st, leading to what some doctors are calling “death by budget cuts.”
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Innovative, cost-saving methods for medicine dispersal should be applauded, not eliminated. But in Iowa, a novel telemedicine program that allows women access to the abortion pill without having to go to a clinic for the drug to be dispensed is under attack. As covered previously on Change.org, the program helps women, particularly in rural areas, access the pill. Instead of an in-person meeting, the doctor consults with the patient via a video teleconference, and then unlocks a container by remote control to release the pill. It saves time, increases access and reduces costs.
But as covered on the Women’s Rights blog, Iowa state legislators are working to ban the practice, and Nebraska, which doesn’t even offer the service yet, is planning to introduce a bill that would require doctors to be in the same room when the pills are dispensed.
This would serve to restrict access to the abortion pill for women in areas where there may not be a doctor willing to provide a surgery. Although the pill, marketed as Miseprex, hasn’t increased the number of abortions in the U.S., more and more women are chosing medication abortions when they do have them. But even though use of the pill has become widespread, it has not susbstantially improved women’s geographic access to abortion — most medication abortions are provided at or near facilities that already offer surgical abortions. The telemedicine option would help to solve that.
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