Center for Tobacco Products News

Black Voice  News

Dr. Ernest Levister, Jr.

Finding that the availability of menthol cigarettes increases the number of children and African Americans who smoke, the Food and Drug Administration’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee has concluded, “Removal of menthol cigarettes from the marketplace would benefit public health in the United States.”

The agency’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee stopped short of recommending an outright ban of menthol cigarettes. The FDA should consider other factors, the advisers said, including that a ban could increase counterfeit and smuggled cigarettes.

“The availability of menthol cigarettes has an adverse impact on public health by increasing the number of smokers with resulting premature death and avoidable mortalities,” committee member Mark Clanton, chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, said in his summary of the report.

The committee based its recommendation on findings that menthol cigarettes increase the number of children who experiment with cigarettes and the number of children who become regular smokers, increasing overall youth smoking. It also concluded that the availability of menthol cigarettes reduces smoking cessation, especially among African Americans, and increases the overall prevalence of smoking among African Americans. It found that “menthol cigarettes are marketed disproportionately to younger smokers” and “disproportionately marketed per capita to African Americans.”

The committee’s conclusions leave no doubt that menthol cigarettes have had a profound adverse impact on public health in the United States, resulting in more smoking and more death and disease from tobacco use. It also leaves no doubt that the tobacco industry is directly responsible for the harm caused by menthol cigarettes because of its targeted marketing of children and African American and other communities, and its manipulation of menthol cigarettes to appeal to specific target markets.

Lupus drug Benlysta — and its recent approval by the FDA — is not run-of-the-mill news. Sometimes federal approval of new drugs doesn’t garner much attention, but Benlysta is the first new drug to treat lupus in more than 50 years. And for people with lupus, that’s quite a development.

Bear in mind: It’s not a cure; there isn’t one. But the drug holds promise and hope for the estimated 1.5 million people in the U.S. who have some form of the autoimmune disease.

With Black women some three times as likely to contract lupus as any other population and at younger ages, understandably there is plenty of excitement surrounding the new drug therapy Benlysta, but sisters shouldn’t make for the Moët quite yet.

While there’s incredible promise in medicine that’s genetically-targeted – or “molecularly profiled” – early results for Benlysta have not determined overall effectiveness in those of African descent.

Lupus causes the body to turn on itself, misidentifying healthy cells as hostile invaders. Previous drugs suppressed an immune system that had gone haywire. Benlysta works as an intravenous drug in combination with existing ones, attacking those errant proteins, as opposed to the entire immune system.

For years, the disease was just considered a form of arthritis.

Lumping lupus into that broader category curbed meaningful moves toward causes and cures. Add that it was a disease that mostly afflicted women, and you get the snail’s pace that marked modern investigative efforts, said Sandra C. Raymond, president and CEO of the Lupus Foundation of America.

Symptoms can flare, go into remission and then rage again. Increased miscarriages, accelerated kidney disease, stroke and even death due to compromised organ functions are among the bleaker realities for lupus patients. And though science hasn’t unlocked the reasons, lupus smashes the systems of Black women more severely and rapidly once it strikes – even more so than with any other group.

Human Genome Sciences Inc., which partnered with global pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to create and market the drug, agreed to additional clinical trials to better measure results among Blacks.