Women who smoke when pregnant are more likely to have agressive children. That's the conclusion of a report made public at an international conference on aggression in Montreal. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Antismoking policies targeting youths won't significantly reduce the number of smokers in the US for decades, according to researchers at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. Campaign efforts should be directed towards adults instead, they suggest. ...

Cigarette use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.1 One of the national health objectives for 2010 is to reduce the prevalence of current cigarette use among high school students to 16% (objective no. 27-2b).1 To examine changes in cigarette use among high school students in the United States during 1991-2003, CDC analyzed data from the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). ...

Banning smoking in the home is associated with a small but significant reduction in urinary cotinine to creatinine ratios in infants, whereas less strict measures compared with no measures to reduce tobacco smoke in the home had no effect on exposure of infants. ...

Thirteen-year-old Donald Cox says he knows firsthand the dangers of secondhand cigarette smoke. He's growing up in a home with parents who smoke, and he says he now suffers from asthma. ...

On August 2, 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a new advertising campaign in five states and eleven media markets to help ensure greater retailer compliance with the FDA regulation that makes the sale of tobacco products to minors illegal. ...

"(Tobacco companies) don't have to tell the government the principal ingredients," Banzhaf told UPI. "In a sense they are able to use their customers as guinea pigs to find out whether any of these things are toxic." Banzhaf said that, like soft-drink manufacturers, tobacco companies try to secure brand loyalty at a young age. He said it is no coincidence Camel's flavored blends appeared after the 1998 settlement that banned tobacco companies from marketing to young people. ...

Until now, little evidence has supported the theory that tobacco companies use movies as advertising vehicles. Congress has long been aware that the Philip Morris Cos. paid to "place" Marlboro cigarettes and signage in the first and second "Superman" movies. And lawmakers learned a year after the fact that, in 1988, the same company shelled out $350,000 to showcase Lark cigarettes in the James Bond film, "License to Kill." ...

Twenty-nine states would have been better off passing a $4 excise tax on a carton of cigarettes rather than signing multibillion-dollar tobacco settlements, a study concludes. By far the largest of the pacts is the Master Settlement Agreement. As part of the landmark 1998 accord, major tobacco companies agreed to make about $206 billion in annual payments over more than two decades. Four states made separate deals in the '90s worth roughly $40 billion _ which are combined with the MSA for the purpose of the study. ...