Deeming Extension Thanks To The Coronavirus

[Tommy Boy]

I will have to look into this stuff more. Thanks for the info guys

 

[Bowie]

@Bowie

I hope this didn’t sound ungrateful. That was definitely not my intent. For fear of sounding arrogant I left out that I’m fortunate enough to be working through all of this and have the means to make those purchases. I would certainly appreciate any recommendations. However, if you’re in a generous mood, I’d prefer you take part in the pay it forward campaign as I feel that’s a better use of generosity in these times.

My apologies if it came off as unappreciative.

No it didn’t come off that way at all. I hope you get home soon. (But if you have to be stuck somewhere, it doesn’t get much better than Texas.) Good idea to donate It to the pay it forward campaign.

 

[jguss]

Well, it's a money issue, as much as it is a health issue. Estimates of the cost of smoking in economic terms surpasses the revenue it brings in, which is why there's support for restricting smoking and eventually eradicating it all across the political spectrum.

I thought economic modeling demonstrated that less smoking equals longer average lifespans resulting in greater aggregate healthcare spending over the population as a whole. I know for sure that some studies came to that conclusion.

 

[greeneyes]

I thought economic modeling demonstrated that less smoking equals longer average lifespans resulting in greater aggregate healthcare spending over the population as a whole. I know for sure that some studies came to that conclusion.

Jay Olshansky is one of the better-known proponents of what you're discussing, Jon. Accordingly one of the big pushes in the field of aging research is away from extending lifespan and toward improving 'healthspan' (i.e. health-years).

"The survival of large segments of human populations to advanced ages is a crowning achievement of improvements in public health and medicine. But, in the 21st century, our continued desire to extend life brings forth a unique dilemma. The risk of death from cardiovascular diseases and many forms of cancer have declined, but even if they continue to do so in the future, the resulting health benefits and enhanced longevities are likely to diminish. It is even possible that healthy life expectancy could decline in the future as major fatal diseases wane. The reason is that the longer we live, the greater is the influence of biological aging on the expression of fatal and disabling diseases. As long as the rates of aging of our bodies continues without amelioration, the progress we make on all major disease fronts must eventually face a point of diminishing returns." J. Olshansky, Articulating the Case for the Longevity Dividend​

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Articulating the Case for the Longevity Dividend - PMC

The survival of large segments of human populations to advanced ages is a crowning achievement of improvements in public health and medicine. But, in the 21st century, our continued desire to extend life brings forth a unique dilemma. The risk of ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[karam]

Jay Olshansky is one of the better-known proponents of what you're discussing, Jon. Accordingly one of the big pushes in the field of aging research is away from extending lifespan and toward improving 'healthspan' (i.e. health-years).

"The survival of large segments of human populations to advanced ages is a crowning achievement of improvements in public health and medicine. But, in the 21st century, our continued desire to extend life brings forth a unique dilemma. The risk of death from cardiovascular diseases and many forms of cancer have declined, but even if they continue to do so in the future, the resulting health benefits and enhanced longevities are likely to diminish. It is even possible that healthy life expectancy could decline in the future as major fatal diseases wane. The reason is that the longer we live, the greater is the influence of biological aging on the expression of fatal and disabling diseases. As long as the rates of aging of our bodies continues without amelioration, the progress we make on all major disease fronts must eventually face a point of diminishing returns." J. Olshansky, Articulating the Case for the Longevity Dividend​

​

Articulating the Case for the Longevity Dividend - PMC

The survival of large segments of human populations to advanced ages is a crowning achievement of improvements in public health and medicine. But, in the 21st century, our continued desire to extend life brings forth a unique dilemma. The risk of ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Interesting article, and not too hard to understand for the layman with the car analogy.

One of the key problems of aging science is that the field has been plagued by quite a few quacks over the years (centuries in fact), which is picked up in the article.

In health economics, which I touch upon in my job, there are concepts that may seem bizarre but do hold up to the science and the math: there are points in time where a patient will incur so much costs that the only "good" outcome (from an economic sense) is them dying. Healthcare costs and resource use (material and human) skyrocket during the last months/weeks of terminal patients' lives.

There's no easy solution, it is a fact that the more our life expectancy grows the more we'll "cost" the healthcare system, in a short period of time. I for one say now, at the youngish age of 38, that I don't want to be a methuselah. I've the luck to have had three grandparents live past 90 (91, 94 and 95) and was close to all three in their last years to be able to say with some certainty that all three expressed they would have preferred to go some years earlier, before it all went downhill. I should add, all three enjoyed very good, very healthy lives until the age of 85, then, as the article says, it all started going bad for them.

 

[sablebrush52]

I thought economic modeling demonstrated that less smoking equals longer average lifespans resulting in greater aggregate healthcare spending over the population as a whole. I know for sure that some studies came to that conclusion.

Hi Jon,
As you well know, there're lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The studies I saw factored in the loss of productivity due to health issues, as well as costs associated with shortened health years to come up with tens of billions of dollars in yearly costs due to smoking.

 

[sablebrush52]

Summing it up--if the tobacco manufacturers are successful in convincing the FDA that tobacco blends are just "variations on a theme" and not significantly different from one another in any terms that are relevant to health, then each blend will cost $3,500 - $22,700 to register; otherwise, if each blend is considered distinct from one another, registering each blend will cost $117,000 to around $466,000.

If I have interpreted this correctly, the industry lawyers have to be very carefully preparing argumentation to the effect that most blends are, according to the FDAs definition, basically the same.

The FDA seems to have a particular prejudice against vaping (which I hope they don't apply to pipe tobacco) and they use this very alarming language in their FAQ [1]:

"(Q) I am a vape shop with hundreds of different e-liquids. Do I need to submit an application for each flavor/ingredient variant or nicotine strength? Can I bundle similar products into one, or just a few, applications?​

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(A) Each tobacco product application is a unique situation. .... when FDA receives a premarket submission that covers multiple, distinct new tobacco products, we intend to consider information on each product as a separate, individual PMTA. FDA considers each ENDS [electronic cigarettes] product with a differing flavoring variant or nicotine strength to be a different product."​

It appears that the FDA is going to essentially destroy the "cottage industry" that is vaping by forcing each vaping formulation (e-liquid) to be registered for a whopping fee. If the FDA goes after the pipe tobacco manufacturers with a similar amount of prejudice it's going to be a bleak situation for the post 2017 blends.

[1]FDA Center for Tobacco Products Commonly Asked Questions - https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/about-center-tobacco-products-ctp/commonly-asked-questions-about-center-tobacco-products#2

It's no secret that Big Tobacco had a hand in crafting this legislation as a way to kill competition to their cigarette business from vaping. It's designed to hand them a virtual monopoly since only they have the deep pockets to absorb the ludicrous costs. Following the FDA announcement in the Spring of 2016, there are several articles detailing this.

 

[greeneyes]

One of the key problems of aging science is that the field has been plagued by quite a few quacks over the years (centuries in fact), which is picked up in the article.

Oh I know it. The B.S. and moneymaking schemes are boundless. I could name more than a few names but this is a public forum after all.

 

[Casual]

I think I should invent a new mulch. Take some organic matter, dry it out, shred it, and put some sugar water on it to encourage its microbiome. It would come in convenient tins for home gardeners to use sparingly in their potted plants.

I’ve even got names for different mulches. You can have My Mulch 965, or Early Morning Plant, or Big ‘n Barley.

I hope my customers would be careful with the product. I’d hate to see the whole idea go up in smoke.

 

[saltedplug]

I wished someone had intervened in my youth as my dad smoked when and where he pleased, including in the car with passengers. It stank.

Restricted smoking touched me for the first time in 1990. The company I worked for designated a smoking room. A year or two later they banned all indoor smoking. The next level was a major Washington state university banning smoking anywhere on it hundreds of acres campus.

In 2013 I bought $10K of tobacco. The government was NOT going to put its nose in my pipe smoking. But then in 2018 two years ago my afflicted respiration persuaded me to quit, no matter the stacks of jars and boxes of tins I had laid in.

Then came WHO and the FDA, and the former, looking at the fatalities from cigarette smoking, aptly named it a scourge. But from what I know cigarette smoking was their only source of data. There was very little or no variability to estimate different rates of fatalities from cigars or pipes, and within pipes, differentiating a multiple and daily bowls from others smoking a bowl or two a week.

My doctor's thinking is that any type and any periodicity of tobacco use is deadly, and I believe he concluded that from the analysis of tobacco use worldwide done in the last 10 years. Every polity in the world had come to similar conclusions, but Big Tobacco could only maintain the fiction of risk-free smoking for so long, and the health organizations had the data.

Deeming is WHO's muscle flexing obtruding in every smoker's life in support of, I guess, its goal of eradicating tobacco, which it is unlikely to ever do.