Monday July 21, 2014 – 11am
Posted Jul 21, 2014 02:26:42 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
11:00- Lawson Greenburg, analyst with the Health Statistics Divisionat Statistics Canada, Co-author of the Report
Canadians have added 25 years to their lifespan in the last century, pushing the limits of aging to extraordinary lengths. But while life expectancy continues to grow, progress is slowing, due in part to a lack of a single game-changing breakthrough on the scale of penicillin. The average Canadian’s life expectancy at birth is 81.7, up from 57 in 1921, according to a report from Statistics Canada. In 2011, 85 was the most common age at life’s end, the top of what has been referred to as the “wall of death,” said the Ninety Years of Change in Life Expectancy report. But physicians and futurists claim it can be pushed ever further, even another quarter-century or more.
11:30- Dr. Leia Minaker, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact
They look like Fruit Roll-ups, they smell like bubble gum, but they can kill like tobacco. Watermelon-flavoured cigarillos, maple syrup cigars that smell like warm pancakes, skinny minty-flavoured cigarettes that look like a lipstick. Research shows these products are 6 times more popular with youth than with adults. What’s more, a recent study showed that more than half of tobacco users in Grades 9 through 12 smoke flavoured products, and the Health Canada survey it was based on estimated that every month about 29,000 teenagers try one of these fruity or minty nicotine delivery devices for the first time. That’s a lot of kids getting their hands on a product that was supposedly banned four years ago by the federal government, after an election promise by Stephen Harper. Without missing a beat, the companies quickly repackaged the products and changed the filter. What’s more, in enacting its ban in 2010, Ottawa did not even attempt to do away with the most popular tobacco flavouring of all – menthol. (The European Union has banned it and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering one.)
@UWaterloo’s Leia Minaker
Listen:
