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E-cigarettes popularity forces firms to review policies

[email protected] (Agencies)
November 11, 2013

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When John Castellano feels like a smoke, he simply heads to the break room at Kraft Foods’s factory in Garland, Texas.

The technician has been able to indulge his habit in common areas at work since he started using electronic cigarettes, which emit vapor rather than smoke.

E-cigarettes are “very liberating,” said Castellano, 39, who used to join the other cigarette addicts at the factory’s designated smoking area.

Twenty-five years after companies began banning smoking in the workplace, the increasing popularity of e-cigarettes is forcing them to review their policies.

Many corporations still ban “vaping” as they wait to see if the FDA will regulate e-cigarettes as strictly as regular smokes. Yet Kraft and Walgreen allow local managers to set the rules. Smaller firms, especially creative agencies and Web startups, have already adopted a more laissez-faire attitude.

US e-cigarettes sales will triple this year to $1.5 billion, according to Euromonitor International. They’re expected to accelerate as traditional tobacco makers muscle into a market previously dominated by small players.

Both Altria Group and Reynolds American, the biggest US tobacco sellers, are expanding distribution of e-cigarettes. Lorillard controls about half of the USmarket with blu eCigs, which it acquired last year.

So far, small companies where bosses can monitor whether e-cigarettes bother co-workers are more likely to allow vaping.

“It is all new to us,” said Ged King, president of the Sales Factory, a 35-employee marketing firm based here. He looked up in surprise during a staff meeting a few months ago to see an employee vaping. Now several employees do it, presumably “to help them kick the smoking habit,” he said.

“We’ve not put a policy in place because nobody has complained,” King said.

The technology gives users seeking anonymity an edge. E-cigarettes heat liquid nicotine into an inhaled vapor, dissipating faster than cigarette smoke. So workers more worried about being seen than smelled puff e-cigarettes in empty offices and bathrooms, according to posts on the E-Cigarette Forum website, where visitors share favorite flavors and vaping lounges, plus tips on how to avoid offending co-workers.

“I’m doing it on the down-low and just close the door,” said Dennis Rumpf, a construction manager in Charlotte, N.C. He declined to identify his employer because it didn’t authorize him to speak publicly.

Rumpf, 37, said he alternates between menthol and classic tobacco flavors in the e-cigarettes he’s been using for six months, after 19 years as a smoker.

“I have people come into my office all the time and I’m sure they’d say something if they noticed anything,” he said.

Web developer Adam Gray has won his boss’s approval to use e-cigarettes at his Minnetonka, Minnesota, office.

“It makes him more productive and sets him on a path for better health,” said Paul Hanson, chief operating officer of TrackIF LLC, a firm that monitors price changes across the Web.

Gray, 27, can “vape all day, a puff here and there” without leaving his desk, he said.

Kraft doesn’t have a companywide e-cigarettes policy and allows managers to make their own rules as long as they abide by local and state laws. Walgreen, the largest US drugstore retailer, also leaves decisions to office managers.

However, health and regulatory uncertainties have prompted many employers to treat e-cigarettes like regular cigarettes, said Paula Andersen, a registered nurse at Buck Consultants, a human- resources firm that advises companies on health programs.

“We recommend that if companies do have a tobacco-free policy that they call electronic cigarettes out as well,” said Andersen, who declined to identify clients.

Exxon Mobil and General Motors allow vaping in designated smoking areas, while CVS Caremark and Lowe’s ban e-cigarettes and regular smokes. Levi Strauss & Co. forces vapers to go outside.

“For the most part, people who vape are treated as smokers,” said LeeAnn Blohm, who favors chocolate peanut butter and butterscotch e-cigarettes. She declined to identify her employer in Austin, Texas, which doesn’t allow vaping inside.

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News Network
February 22,2020

Feb 22: The subjective feeling of well-being experienced by many people with the practice of meditation is associated with specific changes in the brain, according to a study which may lead to better clinical recommendations of the practice.

The study, published in the journal Brain and Cognition, examined the effects of the technique known as Transcendental Meditation (TM), which consists of the silent repetition of a meaningless sound.

In the study, the researchers from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy, enrolled 34 healthy young volunteers and divided them in two groups.

They said the first group practised TM 40 minutes per day in two sessions of 20 minutes each, one in the morning and the other in the evening.

The second group, the scientists said, did not change its daily routine.

Using questionnaires, they also measured the anxiety and stress levels of all the participants at the beginning of the study, as well as the subjects' ability to manage stressful situations.

According to the researchers, the participants were also subjected to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan, in order to measure the organ's activity at rest, and changes in the excitation among different cerebral areas.

They repeated the tests after three months, at the end of the study.

According to the study, the levels of anxiety and stress perceived by the subjects who followed the meditation program were significantly reduced in comparison with those of the volunteers who did not practice TM.

"Magnetic resonance imaging also shows that the reduction of anxiety levels is associated with specific changes in the connectivity between different cerebral areas, such as precuneus, left parietal lobe and insula, which all have an important role in the modulation of emotions and inner states," said study co-author Giulia Avvenuti from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.

"In the control group, instead, none of these changes was observed. The fact that Transcendental Meditation has measurable effects on the 'dialogue' between brain structures involved in the modulation of affective states opens new perspectives for the understanding of brain-mind relationships," said Pietro Pietrini, IMT School's Director, and co-author of the study.

"It also extends the results of recent research suggesting that drugs therapies and psychotherapy leverage on the same biological mechanism," Pietrini said.

According to the researchers, even a few months of practice of TM can have positive effects which can be correlated with measurable changes in the brain.

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Agencies
June 24,2020

New Delhi, Jun 24: Expanding the testing criterion for coronavirus, the Indian Council of Medical Research has said it should be made widely available to all symptomatic individuals across the country.

"Since test, track and treat' is the only way to prevent spread of infection and save lives, it is imperative that testing should be made widely available to all symptomatic individuals in every part of the country and contact tracing mechanisms for containment of infection are further strengthened," it said in an advisory on 'Newer Additional Strategies for COVID-19 Testing' on Tuesday.

In its revised testing strategy for COVID-19 issued on May 18, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had advised testing for all symptomatic Influenza-like illness (ILI) among returnees and migrants within seven days of illness.

All hospitalised patients who develop ILI symptoms, symptomatic individuals living within hotspots or containment zones and healthcare and frontline workers involved in containment and mitigation of coronavirus were also advised testing.

The apex health research body has also advised authorities to enable all government and private hospitals, offices and public sector units to perform antibody-based COVID-19 testing for surveillance to help allay fears and anxiety of healthcare workers and office employees.

The earlier advisories on rapid antibody testing advisories had focused on areas reporting clusters (containment zones), large migration gatherings/evacuees centers and testing of symptomatic ILI individuals at facility level.

Besides, the ICMR on Tuesday also recommended deployment of rapid antigen detection tests for COVID-19 in combination with RT-PCR tests in all containment zones, all central and state government medical colleges and government hospitals, all private hospitals approved by the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare (NABH), all NABL-accredited and ICMR approved private labs, for COVID-19 testing.

All hospitals, laboratories and state governments intending to perform the point-of-care antigen tests need to register with ICMR to obtain the login credentials for data entry.

"ICMR advises all state governments, public and private institutions concerned to take required steps to scale up testing for COVID-19 by deploying combination of various tests as advised," the advisory added.

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Agencies
May 10,2020

Washington D.C., May 9: Do the middle age feel much stressful now, and seems to have changed over time, if compared to the life in the 90s? Well, this recent study indicates that it might be true.

The study has signalled to the fact that life may become more stressful majorly for middle-aged people than it was in the 1990s. The researchers reached this analysis even before the novel coronavirus started sweeping the globe.

A team of researchers led by Penn State found that across all ages, there was a slight increase in daily stress in the 2010s compared to the 1990s. But when researchers restricted the sample to people between the ages of 45 and 64, there was a sharp increase in daily stress.

"On average, people reported about 2 percent more stressors in the 2010s compared to people in the past," said David M. Almeida, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.

"That's around an additional week of stress a year. But what really surprised us is that people at mid-life reported a lot more stressors, about 19 percent more stress in 2010 than in 1990. And that translates to 64 more days of stress a year."

Almeida said the findings were part of a larger project aiming to discover whether health during the middle of Americans' lives has been changing over time.

"Certainly, when you talk to people, they seem to think that daily life is more hectic and less certain these days," Almeida said.

For the study, the researchers collected data from 1,499 adults in 1995 and 782 different adults in 2012.

Almeida said the goal was to study two cohorts of people who were the same age at the time the data was collected but born in different decades. All study participants were interviewed daily for eight consecutive days.

During each daily interview, the researchers asked the participants about their stressful experiences throughout the previous 24 hours.

They asked questions related to arguments with family or friends or feeling overwhelmed at home or work, so and so. The participants were also asked how severe their stress was and whether those stressors were likely to impact other areas of their lives.

"We were able to estimate not only how frequently people experienced stress, but also what those stressors mean to them," Almeida said.

"For example, did this stress affect their finances or their plans for the future. And by having these two cohorts of people, we were able to compare daily stress processes in 1990 with daily stress processes in 2010," Almeida added.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants reported significantly more daily stress and lower well-being in the 2010s compared to the 1990s.

Additionally, participants reported a 27 percent increase in the belief that stress would affect their finances and a 17 percent increase in the belief that stress would affect their future plans.

Almeida said he was surprised not that people were more stressed now than in the 90s, but at the age group that was mainly affected.

"We thought that with economic uncertainty, life might be more stressful for younger adults. But we didn't see that. We saw more stress for people at mid-life," Almeida said.

"And maybe that's because they have children who are facing an uncertain job market while also responsible for their own parents. So it's this generational squeeze that's making stress more prevalent for people at mid-life," he concluded.

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