REMINDER:
Current Issues on Health: Candidate Forum is TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 from 5:30-7:00pm at Reeve Union, UW Oshkosh. Hope to see you there. Details from the event will be posted soon!
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Drug Free Communities Grant update
As many of you may know by now, the Winnebago County Health Department received word that we've been awarded a new grant to form a Drug Free Communities Coalition. We won't receive our "official letter" probably until the end of September but the website below lists us as a new grantee for 2008. This is a wonderful opportunity for our county and will be a great addition to our Tobacco Free Coalitions work. I will hopefully post some of the details of the grant before our meeting on September 16.
Check it out!
http://www.ondcp.gov/dfc/
Check it out!
http://www.ondcp.gov/dfc/
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Just wanted to share this article from about a month ago originally from the Boston Globe. Hope it re-ignites the passion you all have for reducing the prevalance of tobacco in Winnebago County. Our efforts DO make a difference!
And don't forget our next meeting is at Buffalo Wild Wings in Oshkosh at 4:30 on Tuesday September 16. See you there!
Massachusetts Tobacco Prevention Program Drove Dramatic Reduction in Smoking Rates, Officials Say
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Thursday announced that the state's smoking rate declined by 8 percent in 2007, attributing the reduction to the reinvigoration of Massachusetts' tobacco control program, the Boston Globe reports. The report, which is based on survey data, indicates that the proportion of Massachusetts adults who smoke decreased from 27.8 percent in 1986 to just 16.4 percent in 2007, marking an 8 percent reduction over 2006 figures and a historic low for the state. Previous research also indicates that the reduction in tobacco use was especially pronounced among adolescents, as the percentage of teenage smokers who reported smoking regularly decreased from 20.5 percent in 2006 to 17.7 percent in 2007.
Massachusetts health authorities credit the improvements in large part to the recent renewal of a statewide anti-tobacco campaign. The two-month, $500,000 initiative included an "aggressive anti-smoking television ad campaign" depicting former smokers whose health was affected by tobacco use, as well as a Web site where state residents can access information on smoking cessation. The health department expects the smoking rate to further decline during 2008, citing evidence that, since the state increased the tobacco tax by $1 in early July, residents made 7,000 calls to the state's tobacco quit line, up from a monthly average of between 400 and 500 calls.
Reflecting on the report's findings, tobacco control specialists warn that it is difficult to predict future smoking rates based on just one year of data. The former director of the state's tobacco control program, meanwhile, says the drop in smoking rates over the last three decades suggests that the state's commitment to tobacco prevention has "fundamentally changed the social norms around smoking in Massachusetts." (Smith, Boston Globe, 7/31/08)
And don't forget our next meeting is at Buffalo Wild Wings in Oshkosh at 4:30 on Tuesday September 16. See you there!
Massachusetts Tobacco Prevention Program Drove Dramatic Reduction in Smoking Rates, Officials Say
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Thursday announced that the state's smoking rate declined by 8 percent in 2007, attributing the reduction to the reinvigoration of Massachusetts' tobacco control program, the Boston Globe reports. The report, which is based on survey data, indicates that the proportion of Massachusetts adults who smoke decreased from 27.8 percent in 1986 to just 16.4 percent in 2007, marking an 8 percent reduction over 2006 figures and a historic low for the state. Previous research also indicates that the reduction in tobacco use was especially pronounced among adolescents, as the percentage of teenage smokers who reported smoking regularly decreased from 20.5 percent in 2006 to 17.7 percent in 2007.
Massachusetts health authorities credit the improvements in large part to the recent renewal of a statewide anti-tobacco campaign. The two-month, $500,000 initiative included an "aggressive anti-smoking television ad campaign" depicting former smokers whose health was affected by tobacco use, as well as a Web site where state residents can access information on smoking cessation. The health department expects the smoking rate to further decline during 2008, citing evidence that, since the state increased the tobacco tax by $1 in early July, residents made 7,000 calls to the state's tobacco quit line, up from a monthly average of between 400 and 500 calls.
Reflecting on the report's findings, tobacco control specialists warn that it is difficult to predict future smoking rates based on just one year of data. The former director of the state's tobacco control program, meanwhile, says the drop in smoking rates over the last three decades suggests that the state's commitment to tobacco prevention has "fundamentally changed the social norms around smoking in Massachusetts." (Smith, Boston Globe, 7/31/08)
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Story from a Coalition Member
Smokefree WI asked our own Roger Dier from CTRI to write a piece for their blog. I thought we could get it out there a little quicker so everyone could read it. His story is below. Thanks Roger for sharing.
(his dad is third person from the left who is standing, No. 4. )
One Victim in the 100 Years War
Each of us involved on the various fronts of the 100 Years War on Tobacco probably has an emotional connection to someone who lost their lives because of tobacco use. I suspect that loss in some way fuels the blow torch of change that each of us feels is necessary. I am no different than you.
Before I tell my story, the phrase “100 Years War on Tobacco” may have slowed your reading pace. The director of UW-CTRI, Michael Fiore, has recently begun using that phrase to describe the protracted and sometimes frustrating struggle in which we are engaged. Dr. Fiore identifies the start of the 100 Years War on Tobacco with the first Surgeon General’s warning on tobacco use in 1964. We are close to being halfway through the 100 Years War and our victories in drastically reducing adult tobacco-use rates and rapidly increasing the number of states with tobacco-free worksite laws is remarkable.
A small part of our common success is encouraging clinicians who treat tobacco users to use the best evidentiary tobacco cessation treatments at every patient visit. The clipped shorthand reminder is to have the tobacco talk with “every patient at every visit.” The every patient at every visit intervention is a consistent and necessary attack to help patients permanently remove the cigarette, cigar, pipe or wad of tobacco from their lives. Ten years ago, a clinical model to treat every patient at every visit was introduced and we know it as the Five A’s: Ask, Assess, Advise, Assist and Arrange.
While we are thankful that the Five A’s model is here, my family could have used that model in the first decade of the 100 Years War instead of in the fourth.
I’d like to introduce you to my dad, Richard (Dick) Dier. Born in Fort Frances, Ontario in 1935, like a lot of Canadian kids he took up the national sport—ice hockey—and Dick Dier was good at it. When he was 13, his parents moved their family across the Rainy River to the International Falls, Minnesota. Sometime in the late 1940s, he put his first cigarette in his mouth.
As my dad grew into a young adult, he continued to smoke and continued to play hockey. Being an athlete who strove to be in top condition despite smoking a pack or two a day were diametrically opposite behaviors, but tobacco addiction, like many addictions, trashes the rational order of things. In 1958, investors launched a professional hockey team called the Green Bay Bobcats. My dad hopped on a DC-3 and flew south from Northern Minnesota to Green Bay to try out for the Bobcats and he made the team at age 23.
He played into his late 20s when he was forced to find a real job. He never stopped smoking as the years in his 30s and 40s sped by. In 1991, he was having problems with one of his knees (most likely some clutter was floating around from his hockey-playing days), so he went to an orthopedist who prescribed minor surgery to clean up his knee. During that visit, when my dad was 56 years old, someone noticed that he had early signs of COPD, or chonic obstructive pulmonary disease. That nurse or doctor advised him to quick smoking. My dad said he would think about it.
A week later my dad called that doctor’s office and said he wanted to try to quit. He got a prescription for the patch, and a month later was smoke-free for the first time in 40 years.
The date he quit smoking was something of which he was proud: Each year, he took my mother out for dinner on the anniversary of his quit date. I had quit smoking and using spit tobacco when I was in my late 20s, but my two brothers, their families and my family were very relieved when he quit. By quitting, I thought he and we had caught a break. My dad and my mom were in their mid-50s and healthy, their children were on their own, their work careers were winding down and the warren of grandchildren to spoil was growing.
In the spring of 1995 my dad dropped a little weight. I saw him on his 60th birthday (June 24, 1995) and noticed his weight was down. I didn’t say anything and remember feeling happy because he had gotten pudgy since quitting. In late July and early August of that year, his face would sometimes be puffy when he woke up in the morning. One Saturday morning in mid-August I biked over to my parents’ house and rapped on the back door. My dad had just gotten up and I was stunned: His face was so swollen that it looked as if it were beaten with two-by-fours.
The following Monday I called his doctor and they told my dad to come in. When he did, they took an X-ray and saw a shadow. That led to a CT scan, which revealed a significant mass that was impeding the flow of blood back to his heart when he was lying down.
He went in for a biopsy on Oct. 17, and I’ll always remember him talking to the surgeon before they wheeled his gurney into the operating room. He grabbed the surgeon’s hand with both of his and asked the surgeon to please fix his face.
They found a cancer, and it was virulent. As his oldest son, I gathered his entire medical history, from International Falls to Green Bay, and took all of it and him to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion and we hoped, a second chance. Before we left, I noticed that in all of his examinations before 1991 not one clinician talked to him about his smoking. The first time a clinician told him he needed to quit smoking occurred in that pre-surgery consult in 1991.
The journey from life to death for someone suffering from lung cancer is too visually horrible and emotionally painful to recall here. I will share this, however: On our way back from Mayo Clinic, he rued the day he ever started smoking and said, “Those goddamn cigarettes, they just don’t let you go.”
I often share my dad’s story with clinicians, and their crowded lives being what they are, I suspect that it’s one of the few things they take away from my presentations. My dad died on Feb. 12, 1996, about 100 days after he was first diagnosed. He was only 60 years old and he wasn’t ready to leave his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his friends or his life.
I tell my dad’s story to help clinicians understand how much power and responsibility they have when they talk to their patients who use tobacco. I am haunted to know that if a clinician had talked to him about quitting smoking in 1961, 1971 or 1981 instead of waiting until 1991, Dick Dier might be 73 years old today and wondering why the Green Bay Packers ever parted ways with Brett Favre.
--Roger Dier, MS, is a UW-CTRI outreach specialist in the Northeast Region.
Each of us involved on the various fronts of the 100 Years War on Tobacco probably has an emotional connection to someone who lost their lives because of tobacco use. I suspect that loss in some way fuels the blow torch of change that each of us feels is necessary. I am no different than you.
Before I tell my story, the phrase “100 Years War on Tobacco” may have slowed your reading pace. The director of UW-CTRI, Michael Fiore, has recently begun using that phrase to describe the protracted and sometimes frustrating struggle in which we are engaged. Dr. Fiore identifies the start of the 100 Years War on Tobacco with the first Surgeon General’s warning on tobacco use in 1964. We are close to being halfway through the 100 Years War and our victories in drastically reducing adult tobacco-use rates and rapidly increasing the number of states with tobacco-free worksite laws is remarkable.
A small part of our common success is encouraging clinicians who treat tobacco users to use the best evidentiary tobacco cessation treatments at every patient visit. The clipped shorthand reminder is to have the tobacco talk with “every patient at every visit.” The every patient at every visit intervention is a consistent and necessary attack to help patients permanently remove the cigarette, cigar, pipe or wad of tobacco from their lives. Ten years ago, a clinical model to treat every patient at every visit was introduced and we know it as the Five A’s: Ask, Assess, Advise, Assist and Arrange.
While we are thankful that the Five A’s model is here, my family could have used that model in the first decade of the 100 Years War instead of in the fourth.
I’d like to introduce you to my dad, Richard (Dick) Dier. Born in Fort Frances, Ontario in 1935, like a lot of Canadian kids he took up the national sport—ice hockey—and Dick Dier was good at it. When he was 13, his parents moved their family across the Rainy River to the International Falls, Minnesota. Sometime in the late 1940s, he put his first cigarette in his mouth.
As my dad grew into a young adult, he continued to smoke and continued to play hockey. Being an athlete who strove to be in top condition despite smoking a pack or two a day were diametrically opposite behaviors, but tobacco addiction, like many addictions, trashes the rational order of things. In 1958, investors launched a professional hockey team called the Green Bay Bobcats. My dad hopped on a DC-3 and flew south from Northern Minnesota to Green Bay to try out for the Bobcats and he made the team at age 23.
He played into his late 20s when he was forced to find a real job. He never stopped smoking as the years in his 30s and 40s sped by. In 1991, he was having problems with one of his knees (most likely some clutter was floating around from his hockey-playing days), so he went to an orthopedist who prescribed minor surgery to clean up his knee. During that visit, when my dad was 56 years old, someone noticed that he had early signs of COPD, or chonic obstructive pulmonary disease. That nurse or doctor advised him to quick smoking. My dad said he would think about it.
A week later my dad called that doctor’s office and said he wanted to try to quit. He got a prescription for the patch, and a month later was smoke-free for the first time in 40 years.
The date he quit smoking was something of which he was proud: Each year, he took my mother out for dinner on the anniversary of his quit date. I had quit smoking and using spit tobacco when I was in my late 20s, but my two brothers, their families and my family were very relieved when he quit. By quitting, I thought he and we had caught a break. My dad and my mom were in their mid-50s and healthy, their children were on their own, their work careers were winding down and the warren of grandchildren to spoil was growing.
In the spring of 1995 my dad dropped a little weight. I saw him on his 60th birthday (June 24, 1995) and noticed his weight was down. I didn’t say anything and remember feeling happy because he had gotten pudgy since quitting. In late July and early August of that year, his face would sometimes be puffy when he woke up in the morning. One Saturday morning in mid-August I biked over to my parents’ house and rapped on the back door. My dad had just gotten up and I was stunned: His face was so swollen that it looked as if it were beaten with two-by-fours.
The following Monday I called his doctor and they told my dad to come in. When he did, they took an X-ray and saw a shadow. That led to a CT scan, which revealed a significant mass that was impeding the flow of blood back to his heart when he was lying down.
He went in for a biopsy on Oct. 17, and I’ll always remember him talking to the surgeon before they wheeled his gurney into the operating room. He grabbed the surgeon’s hand with both of his and asked the surgeon to please fix his face.
They found a cancer, and it was virulent. As his oldest son, I gathered his entire medical history, from International Falls to Green Bay, and took all of it and him to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion and we hoped, a second chance. Before we left, I noticed that in all of his examinations before 1991 not one clinician talked to him about his smoking. The first time a clinician told him he needed to quit smoking occurred in that pre-surgery consult in 1991.
The journey from life to death for someone suffering from lung cancer is too visually horrible and emotionally painful to recall here. I will share this, however: On our way back from Mayo Clinic, he rued the day he ever started smoking and said, “Those goddamn cigarettes, they just don’t let you go.”
I often share my dad’s story with clinicians, and their crowded lives being what they are, I suspect that it’s one of the few things they take away from my presentations. My dad died on Feb. 12, 1996, about 100 days after he was first diagnosed. He was only 60 years old and he wasn’t ready to leave his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his friends or his life.
I tell my dad’s story to help clinicians understand how much power and responsibility they have when they talk to their patients who use tobacco. I am haunted to know that if a clinician had talked to him about quitting smoking in 1961, 1971 or 1981 instead of waiting until 1991, Dick Dier might be 73 years old today and wondering why the Green Bay Packers ever parted ways with Brett Favre.
--Roger Dier, MS, is a UW-CTRI outreach specialist in the Northeast Region.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
FDA regulation of tobacco products MAY actually happen!
Hi everyone,
If you haven't met me or didn't know, I'm Emily, the new Coordinator of the Winnebago County Tobacco-Free Coalition. I look foward to meeting and working with each of you on some exciting events coming up this year.
Some coming up soon include:
Oshkosh's National Night Out
Tuesday, August 5 from 4-8pm
South Park in Oshkosh
Back to School Fair
Thursday, August 7 from 12-6pm
FVTC Oshkosh
Winnebago County Fair
Thursday/Friday, August 7 and 8 from 3-5pm
Sunnyview
I'll be bring the Tobacco Candy Store to each of these events. I am hoping to target youth and their parents. If any one is free to help at any of these events, email me: edieringer@co.winnebago.wi.us
On a different topic, the US House yesterday voted to give the FDA regulatory power over tobacco products. An article is below:
In a truly historic event today, the U.S. House of Representatives just voted overwhelmingly to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco products. This action comes almost twelve years after the FDA under David Kessler first asserted jurisdiction over tobacco and more than eight years after the Supreme Court ruled that only Congress could give the FDA that authority.
The overwhelming vote of 326 to 102 in favor of the legislation is rare in today's political climate and reflects the tremendous work that everyone around the country has done to educate the public and our policymakers about the toll of tobacco and the solutions needed to reduce that toll. Attached is the Campaign's statement on today's vote.
The version of the bill passed today includes a few modications from the bill voted on by the Energy and Commerce Committee in April. One important modfication is the addition of language drafted and approved by the Congressional Black Caucus regarding menthol cigarettes. We support these improvements, which accelerate the formation of the new FDA Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee and direct it to issue recommendations on the regulation of menthol in cigarettes within one year of its establishment.
Additional provisions require FDA to publish an action plan to enforce restrictions on the advertising and promotion of menthol and other cigarettes to youth, with priority attention to enforcement in minority communities, and to assist State, local, and Tribal governments in carrying out their authority under the Act to prevent underage tobacco use, particularly in communities with a disproportionate use of menthol cigarettes by minors.The next step is the Senate, where the legislation has 57 co-sponsors, along with a handful of other members who have indicated they will support the bill on the floor.
We are hopeful, despite the limited time left on the Senate calendar, that today's overwhelming bipartisan vote in the House will help encourage the Senate to take up the issue in September.
If you want the full article/information, just email me!
Thanks for all your hard work and dedication to this very important health issue.
Emily
If you haven't met me or didn't know, I'm Emily, the new Coordinator of the Winnebago County Tobacco-Free Coalition. I look foward to meeting and working with each of you on some exciting events coming up this year.
Some coming up soon include:
Oshkosh's National Night Out
Tuesday, August 5 from 4-8pm
South Park in Oshkosh
Back to School Fair
Thursday, August 7 from 12-6pm
FVTC Oshkosh
Winnebago County Fair
Thursday/Friday, August 7 and 8 from 3-5pm
Sunnyview
I'll be bring the Tobacco Candy Store to each of these events. I am hoping to target youth and their parents. If any one is free to help at any of these events, email me: edieringer@co.winnebago.wi.us
On a different topic, the US House yesterday voted to give the FDA regulatory power over tobacco products. An article is below:
In a truly historic event today, the U.S. House of Representatives just voted overwhelmingly to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco products. This action comes almost twelve years after the FDA under David Kessler first asserted jurisdiction over tobacco and more than eight years after the Supreme Court ruled that only Congress could give the FDA that authority.
The overwhelming vote of 326 to 102 in favor of the legislation is rare in today's political climate and reflects the tremendous work that everyone around the country has done to educate the public and our policymakers about the toll of tobacco and the solutions needed to reduce that toll. Attached is the Campaign's statement on today's vote.
The version of the bill passed today includes a few modications from the bill voted on by the Energy and Commerce Committee in April. One important modfication is the addition of language drafted and approved by the Congressional Black Caucus regarding menthol cigarettes. We support these improvements, which accelerate the formation of the new FDA Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee and direct it to issue recommendations on the regulation of menthol in cigarettes within one year of its establishment.
Additional provisions require FDA to publish an action plan to enforce restrictions on the advertising and promotion of menthol and other cigarettes to youth, with priority attention to enforcement in minority communities, and to assist State, local, and Tribal governments in carrying out their authority under the Act to prevent underage tobacco use, particularly in communities with a disproportionate use of menthol cigarettes by minors.The next step is the Senate, where the legislation has 57 co-sponsors, along with a handful of other members who have indicated they will support the bill on the floor.
We are hopeful, despite the limited time left on the Senate calendar, that today's overwhelming bipartisan vote in the House will help encourage the Senate to take up the issue in September.
If you want the full article/information, just email me!
Thanks for all your hard work and dedication to this very important health issue.
Emily
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)