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Español The german war against cigarettes
Germany had the world's strongest anti-smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, during the Nazi period. Hitler, who was a chain-smoker, was expelled from school at age eight after being caught smoking. He gave up smoking when he was 35 years old and dreamed of making all Germans quit, too.
Bans on smoking in public spaces were introduced along with bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations for women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer.
Today, in the German (and European) war against cigarette smoking, German Consumer Affairs Minister Renate Kunast has stepped up the offensive: Kunast published, in 2005, a list of about 200 cigarette additives, and wants those deemed carcinogenic or addictive banned — throughout Europe. Read more »
At the beginning of 2001 some Third World countries and the European Union took legal action in the United States to try to get back billions of dollars in tax revenue they had lost on cigarettes smuggled in by Big Tobacco, a group made up mostly of American companies.
In the late 1700s, physician Edward Jenner injected a young boy with cowpox to test his hypothesis that those who were infected with that disease never contracted the vastly more serious smallpox. A few weeks later, Jenner gave the boy a dose of smallpox. Fortunately for the boy, it worked, and Jenner is known as a hero and a pioneer in vaccination.
This new drug works by stimulating the production of antibodies in the blood. The antibodies stop nicotine from entering the brain and producing the addictive sensation craved by smokers. The vaccine approach has the potential to dramatically alter the way we will treat smoking addiction in the future. This medical product has been fully effective on 50% of the 341 heavy smokers who took part in the study conducted by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Cytos Biotechnology, that is aiming to get it on the market by 2010.
