NCEH’s Tobacco Laboratory helps FDA carry out the Family Smoking Prevention & Tobacco Control Act

November 19, 2014 by

Tobacco products such as cigarettes, cigars, snuff, chew, and pipe tobacco abound with harmful chemicals. The smoke from tobacco products contains more than 7,000 chemical components, and at least 250 are known to harm people’s health.

In 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to regulate the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of tobacco products. When FDA makes decisions about how to regulate tobacco products, they consider how their actions will affect the entire population.

NCEH helps FDA with key data

To gain information on tobacco and health, FDA sought the help of the National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) tobacco laboratory. The laboratory has unique and extensive experience measuring chemicals found in tobacco and tobacco smoke and measuring the biological markers in people that reflect use and levels of exposure.

In the NCEH/ATSDR tobacco laboratory, a researcher inserts cigarettes in a smoking machine to collect data on the particulate matter and gases the cigarettes release.

To provide the needed information, the NCEH tobacco laboratory

modified existing laboratory methods to speed up measuring the chemicals and processing the data, and
developed and validated new methods to measure more chemicals and biological markers that help guide decisions about tobacco regulation.

Since 2012, researchers in the tobacco laboratory have made more than 200,000 measurements of chemicals in cigarettes. This was a dramatic increase in work for NCEH’s tobacco laboratory compared with previous years (i.e., before supporting FDA’s work, the laboratory made about 10,000 measurements a year in cigarettes).

In addition to handling this increase in workload, the laboratory developed 12 new methods of measuring tobacco-related chemicals, completed a survey of cigarette brands sold in the United States, and measured 105 chemicals, including 34 found in cigarette tobacco and 71 found in cigarette smoke.

CDC Winnable Battles…

• Address public health priorities that have a large-scale impact on health.

• Are evidence-based interventions that exist to address the issue and that can be broadly implemented.

• Are areas in which intensive focus and efforts can have a significant impact in a relatively short period.

Lab supports CDC Winnable Battles

The NCEH tobacco lab provides strong and reliable science. The lab’s work is key to efforts to reduce tobacco-related diseases and deaths and supports CDC’s “Winnable Battles” in public health (learn more at http://www.cdc.gov/winnablebattles).

More Information

Find out more about NCEH’s tobacco laboratory.
Visit CDC’s web page on secondhand smoke.