UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Judge rules in favor of e-cigarettes

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has no authority to regulate electronic cigarettes, a federal trial court ruled Thursday.

"This case appears to be yet another example of FDA's aggressive efforts to regulate recreational tobacco products as drugs or devices," U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said in granting a preliminary injunction barring the Obama administration from blocking companies from importing e-cigarettes into the United States.

The FDA's "tenacious drive to maximize its regulatory power has resulted in its advocacy of an interpretation of the relevant law that I find, at first blush, to be unreasonable and unacceptable," Leon said.

The FDA said in a statement to United Press International it was reviewing Leon's decision and would "decide the appropriate action to take."

"The public health issues surrounding electronic cigarettes are of serious concern to the FDA," the agency added.

Electronic cigarettes, also known as personal vaporizers, are battery-powered devices that look and taste like cigarettes and provide inhaled doses of nicotine by way of a vaporized nicotine solution. The vapor also provides a flavor and physical sensation similar to that of inhaled tobacco smoke, but there is no combustion and it doesn't contain tar.

The FDA had seized shipments of electronic cigarettes because it said the devices were marketed as safer alternatives to traditional tobacco.

For at least a year, the agency confiscated e-cigarettes when they reached U.S. ports, The Washington Post reported.

But Smoking Everywhere Inc. of Sunrise, Fla., and Sottera Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz., argued the FDA had no right to regulate or confiscate their products.

Leon observed that Sottera, which markets its cigarettes under the NJOY brand, labeled its products with a disclaimer that they were not for smoking cessation.

On its Web site, the company says a big reason people use the product is because it can be used in places where smoking is prohibited.

Doomsday Clock pushed back 1 minute

NEW YORK, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- Scientists in New York Thursday pushed the symbolic Doomsday Clock's hand back to 6 minutes to midnight, citing hope in nuclear weapons and climate change.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which maintains the clock, said the group, which includes 19 Nobel laureates, moved the hand back 1 minute because of "a more hopeful state of world affairs."

Leaders of countries with nuclear weapons are working to trim down their arsenals, and industrialized and developing nations are pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the bulletin said.

Washington's "orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of (U.S. President Barack) Obama," is also a key to the "new era of cooperation," the bulletin said.

It said Obama was taking a "pragmatic, problem-solving approach" to global challenges.

The world is "poised at a unique time, with hope and opportunity, and we can't blow it," theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, co-chairman of the bulletin's board of sponsors, said at a New York news conference at the National Academy of Sciences near the World Trade Center site.

Bulletin secretary-treasurer Lowell Sachnoff added, "Global warming is more of a threat than nuclear war."

The bulletin, which created the clock in 1947, first set it at 7 minutes to midnight, or "catastrophic destruction." It has adjusted it 19 times since then.

In 1953, after Washington and Moscow tested the first hydrogen bombs within six months of each other, it moved the clock to 2 minutes to midnight. In 1991, after Washington and Moscow signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, it pushed it back to 17 minutes before midnight.

You can't always catch up from sleep loss

BOSTON, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- A good night's sleep cannot make up for chronic sleep deprivation, which has a snowball effect hurting a person's ability to stay alert, Boston researchers say.

People may think they're OK because their body's daily circadian rhythm hides the effects of chronic sleep loss, the study in Science Translational Medicine journal says.

But after sleeping six hours a night for two to three weeks, people's motor skills, reaction times, capacities to focus and other abilities are 10 times worse than after staying awake a single night, Harvard Medical School neurologist and sleep medicine specialist Daniel Cohen said.

The study is "almost scary" because it shows that a large societal segment, including doctors, paramedics, police officers and truckers, "may be at high risk of committing catastrophic errors, particularly in the middle of the night and the early morning hours," University of Chicago sleep researcher Eve Van Cauter tells USA Today.

The study at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital looked at the number of consecutive hours study participants were awake, their number of days or weeks of chronic sleep deprivation and how they reacted at different times of day -- three factors combined that determine how well people perform, the researchers say.

The research suggests "it takes longer to recover from sleep debts than has been believed," University of Pennsylvania sleep studies Professor David Dinges tells the newspaper.

It also shows people's sleep regulation is actually at least two separate processes acting on different time scales -- a short-term process causing performance to decline with each hour awake and a long-term component building over weeks of too-little sleep.

The short-term process can be rapidly overcome with a good night's sleep. The researchers say they don't know how many nights of good sleep it takes to recover from the longer-term component.

Everglades still in decline, group says

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Jan. 14 (UPI) -- The subtropical Florida Everglades wetlands are still deteriorating a decade after Washington began a multibillion-dollar plan to restore them, advocates say.

The Everglades, a victim of a half-century of environmental damage, remains unhealthy, with few species of wildlife other than birds still there and a growing number of invasive species like iguanas, Brazilian pepper plants and Australian pine trees, retired biologist Allen Trefrey told The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post.

Trefrey was part of a flotilla of 12 researchers and volunteers who kayaked down South Florida's 12-million-acre "river of grass" to call attention to its failing health.

"We wanted to bring big visibility to the plight of the Everglades," said John Marshall, chairman of the Arthur R. Marshall Foundation, which champions Everglades restoration and funded the trip.

The flotilla members also collected water samples to measure water quality, foundation Executive Director Josette Kaufman said.

Ten years ago a $7.8 billion project, split between the federal government and Florida over 36 years, promised to restore the Everglades, whose ecosystem lawmakers ranked with that of the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon and the redwood forests of California.

The project has since shrunk in scope, in part because Congress failed to match Florida's commitment of more than $2 billion, The New York Times reported.

At the same time, the project failed to halt the wetlands' decline because of bureaucratic delays, a lack of financing from Congress and overdevelopment, a 2008 study found.

The study by the National Research Council, required by Congress, warned the Everglades was quickly reaching a point of no return.

Without "near-term progress," more species will die off "and the Everglades ecosystem may experience irreversible losses to its character and functioning," it said.