This app is being made available for free for 7 days starting on May 31st in honor of World No Tobacco Day. Its usual price is $4.99, in order to raise funds for the research program at UCSF/SFGH.

The San Francisco Stop Smoking application works in Spanish or English. It helps smokers discover connections between smoking, mood, and day-to-day life to help smokers quit and stay quit. 

Kids in Nebraska can play their way into learning about the dangers of smoking and tobacco use, and reasons to remain tobacco free, thanks to a new booklet: the Tobacco Free Times.

Tobacco Free Nebraska has created the Tobacco Free Times, a booklet that includes a wordsearch, a codebreaker, a maze and other activities for kids to solve while they're learning about why to remain tobacco free.

Kids will learn about flavored tobacco products, what they can do instead of trying flavored tobacco and smokeless tobacco. They'll learn about smoking's effects on how we look and smell. And they'll learn about myths and the truth. Here's an excerpt from the booklet:


Myth: Chewing tobacco is a harmless alternative to smoking.
Truth: Chewing tobacco is still tobacco. It contains nitrosamines, cancer-causing chemicals from the curing process.
Myth: Dip or chew improves my athletic performance.
Truth: A study of professional baseball players found no connection between chewing tobacco and player performance. Using smokeless tobacco increases your heart rate and blood pressure within a few minutes, which places extra stress on your heart. This may actually reduce your overall performance.
Myth: Taking care of my gums can offset the harmful effects of using dip or chew.
Truth: There’s no proof that brushing and flossing will undo the harm that smokeless tobacco does to your teeth and gums.
Myth: It’s easy to quit using smokeless tobacco when I want to.
Truth: Nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco, is also found in chew. Nicotine addiction makes quitting difficult.

The booklet is available for download as a pdf, thanks to Tobacco Free Nebraska.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched a new campaign to  educate retailers and raise awareness about tobacco product regulations. 

Break the Chain is designed to protect kids from the dangers of tobacco use and its negative health impacts.

According to Tobacco Free Nebraska's Data and Trends on Tobacco Use in Nebraska (April 2010), 45.1 percent of youth have ever tried smoking or cigarettes, even one puff. Each year in Nebraska, 2,200 kids younger than 18 are new daily smokers each year. Almost 80 percent of all adult smokers first become regular smokers before the age of 18. In fact, 90 percent do so before leaving their teens. That's according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

As part of the FDA's campaign, it has produced posters, flyers, bilingual bookmarks, mirror and window clings, stickers, toolkits and self mailers.

These materials are available for order to help promote tobacco free kids.

Every day in the United States, almost 4,000 kids younger than 18 try their first cigarette and 1,000 kids younger than 18 become daily smokers. In Nebraska, 2,200 kids younger than 18 will become new daily smokers each year.

Many of these kids will become addicted before they are old enough to understand the risks and will ultimately die too young of tobacco-related diseases. 

In response to the problem of tobacco use and as a result of Congressional Legislation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  is working to protect the health of America’s children and ultimately reduce the burden of illness and death caused by tobacco use.

To protect kids from becoming addicted to tobacco products and suffering the deadly effects of tobacco, the FDA Center for Tobacco Products issued a rule limiting the sale, distribution, and marketing of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco.

Requirements Relating to Sale and Distribution

• Prohibits the sale of cigarettes or smokeless tobacco to people younger than 18.
• Prohibits the sale of cigarette packages with fewer than 20 cigarettes.
• Prohibits the sale of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco in vending machines, self-service displays, or other impersonal modes of sales, except in very limited situations.
• Prohibits free samples of cigarettes and limits distribution of smokeless tobacco products.

Requirements Relating to Marketing (Labeling, Advertising, and Promotion)

• Prohibits tobacco brand name sponsorship of any athletic, musical, or other social or cultural event, or any team or entry in those events.
• Prohibits gifts or other items in exchange for buying cigarettes or smokeless tobacco products.
• Requires that audio ads use only words with no music or sound effects.
• Prohibits the sale or distribution of items, such as hats and tee shirts, with tobacco brands or logos.

More information about the FDA's efforts to reduce tobacco use among kids is available at the "Protecting Kids from Tobacco Use" website.

Seward County ranked healthiest in Nebraska for health factors that include tobacco use.

That’s according to a report released Wednesday by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The report, County Health Rankings, ranked 75 of Nebraska’s 93 counties. Of those counties that were ranked, Thurston County ranked 75 for health factors that include tobacco use.

Using this new tool, Nebraskans may compare health outcomes and health factors on a county-by-county basis. Nebraskans may also compare their performance on specific health factors against national benchmarks of top-performing counties. More than 3,000 counties nationwide and the District of Columbia are ranked.

The report, County Health Rankings, ranks the health of nearly every county in the nation. The report shows that much of what affects health occurs outside of the doctor’s office.

The County Health Rankings confirms the critical role that factors such as education, jobs, income, and environment play in how healthy people are and how long they live.

The Rankings help counties understand what influences how healthy residents are and how long they will live. The Rankings look at a variety of measures that affect health such as the rate of people dying before age 75, high school graduation rates, access to healthier foods, air pollution levels, income, and rates of smoking, obesity and teen births.

The Rankings, based on the latest data available for each county, is the only tool of its kind that measures the overall health of each county in all 50 states on the multiple factors that influence health. It includes snapshots of nearly every county with a color-coded map that compares each county’s overall health with other counties in each of the 50 states. Using this interactive tool, Nebraskans can compare how their county is doing in areas like diabetes screening rates or number of uninsured adults to national benchmarks.

Each county’s rank reveals a pattern of strengths and weaknesses. And, the Rankings reveal that all counties have areas where they can improve, even those that are the healthiest. Some highlights of what counties look like nationally:

• People are nearly twice as likely to be in fair or poor health in the unhealthiest counties;
  
• Unhealthy counties have significantly lower high school graduation rates;
  
• Unhealthy counties have more than twice as many children in poverty;
  
• Unhealthy counties have much fewer grocery stores or farmer’s markets; and
  
• Unhealthy counties have much higher rates of unemployment.