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- Category: June 2021
A recent study from the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) has suggested that banning the sale of flavoured vaping products can cause higher rates of cigarette smoking among teenagers. The findings come at an especially pertinent moment, given the intense discussion in Europe surrounding e-cigarettes and the possibility of banning flavours. The Netherlands, in particular, is planning to ban e-cigarette flavours, despite a strong public backlash – a decision which could cause far-reaching repercussions in the bloc and beyond.
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- Category: June 2021
Teen vaping and the use of e-cigarettes never stopped during the pandemic. There did seem to be a lull in usage during the pandemic — that lull seems to be gone and inhaling is back with a vengeance.
It’s time for health officials to resume the fight against vaping — that battle slowed during the pandemic. The numbers both nationally, statewide, and locally show the problem is at best holding steady and may be growing worse.
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- Category: June 2021
Tobacco harm reduction is viewed by those who advocate for it, as a pragmatic approach to reducing the harm of smoking related disease and thus, saving millions of lives. Nevertheless, these products, marketed by the tobacco industry, fail to be globally credible as strong controversy around them has arisen. In fact, strong opponents to these alternatives argue that they are not a 100% reliable in fighting efficiently tobacco related diseases and accuse them of being interested in making profit. Influential philanthropic organizations, the World Health Organization and national regulators are among the tenacious adversaries of it. Jonathan Fell is a founder of Ash Park. He works on long-term (...)
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- Category: June 2021
In 2009, the federal government passed the aptly titled Cracking Down on Tobacco Marketing Aimed at Youth Act. Its primary objective was to curb a major spike in consumption by young people of flavoured tobacco products, which was fuelled by the tobacco industry’s predatory marketing. The accompanying federal regulations were approved in 2010, but contained a disturbing exemption for menthol products because of the mistaken belief that youth didn’t like them.
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- Category: June 2021
At a recent webinar organised by The Parliament Magazine and the World’s Vapers’ Alliance, EU policymakers and tobacco harm reduction experts came to together to debate the current issues surrounding vaping. Director of the consulting firm The Counterfactual, Clive Bates, highlighted several benefits of the growing popularity of vaping. First, there are physiological differences between those who smoked and those who used alternative products. “If you measure the levels of toxicants in the blood, the saliva and the urine, you’ll find much lower levels, similar to non-smokers or people who quit.” He also pointed out how e-cigarettes ‘displaced’ smoking and were more successful in helping people quit than therapy. He said, “People who use E-cigarettes have a higher quit rate, particularly if they were frequent users.”
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- Category: June 2021
New research published today indicates that BAT's modern oral (MO) products in the form of tobacco-free nicotine pouches have a toxicant profile that is comparable to nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) and much lower than traditional oral snus, a category of products that, when used as the sole nicotine product is already established as a reduced risk product compared with cigarettes. The study, published in Drug and Chemical Toxicology, analysed four variants of one of BAT's MO nicotine pouch products Lyft+, three snus products, and two different NRT products in a lozenge and a gum format. [...]
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- Category: June 2021
Global Forum on Nicotine (GFN) took place June 16-18 in Liverpool. Multiple panel discussions took in subjects ranging from safer nicotine product regulation, tobacco harm reduction in low-to-middle-income countries and orthodoxy and dissent in science. Speakers’ pre-recorded presentations for the panel sessions will remain available online at the conference website. Three keynotes were delivered to honor Michael Russell, a psychiatrist, research scientist and pioneer in the study of tobacco dependence and the development of treatments to help smokers quit. Russell’s observation in the British Medical Journal in 1976 that “people smoke for nicotine, but they die from the tar” remains highly influential within the field.
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- Category: June 2021
This analysis tested the hypothesis that current e-cigarette use was associated with an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection in patients seeking medical care. E-cigarette and conventional cigarette use were ascertained using a novel electronic health record tool, and COVID-19 diagnosis was ascertained by a validated institutional registry. Logistic regression models were fit to assess whether current e-cigarette use was associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 diagnosis. [...]
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- Category: June 2021
The federal government today proposed new regulations banning flavoured vaping products that will, if enacted, diminish the effectiveness of vaping as a reduced risk product compared to cigarettes. "If the government's goal is to ensure that smokers keep smoking, then they couldn't have proposed a better set of regulations", said Allan Rewak, VITA Executive Director. "All these regulations will do is create more barriers for long time heavy smokers while doing little to nothing to address the problem the federal government claims they want to solve, youth vaping", added Rewak. Recent evidence has demonstrated that in jurisdictions such as San Francisco, which implemented a flavour ban in 2018 in an effort to restrict youth vaping, failed totally in its objectives and instead resulted in a doubling of youth smoking rates after years of steady reductions.
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- Category: June 2021
Canada’s plan to significantly decrease the amount of nicotine allowed in vapes and potentially restrict flavours to curb teen vaping has sparked anger among vapers and ex-smokers who say the new rules may turn them back to smokers.
The federal department of Health says the availability of high-nicotine vaping products in the market since 2018 is one of the factors that led to a swift rise in teen vaping. According to the Canadian Student Tobacco, Alcohol, and Drugs Survey, students in Grades 7-12 who vaped doubled from 2016-17 to 2018-19, rising from 10 to 20.2 percent. Nearly 30 percent of Grades 10-12 students were vaping in 2018-19.
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- Category: June 2021
A live panel discussion of vaping advocates and experts discussed a number of inaccuracies that have been recently mentioned in the media. The 2020 US Vape Store Survey has revealed that sensationalist and misleading media reports is what has caused most of the damage to the vape industry in 2020, rather than the coronavirus pandemic, as commonly assumed. “At a time when accuracy in reporting is under the national spotlight, this is a vivid illustration of the real damage that can be caused by irresponsible journalism,” said ECigIntelligence editorial director Barnaby Page. “The EVALI outbreak was shown to be caused by vaping of contaminated street cannabis products – nothing to do with the nicotine products that legitimate vape stores sell – but nevertheless these small businesses suffered heavily as a result of the linkage made in sensational reporting.”
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- Category: June 2021
In front of the pale tower of Los Angeles City Hall, Janet Azhand delivered an impassioned speech in Farsi, surrounded by hookah sellers bearing signs that urged officials to “Save Hookah” and “Preserve Our Culture.”
“Hookah is not vape,” Azhand, who works for a hookah lounge, later told a reporter in English. “They don’t understand.”
In Los Angeles, the push to rid store shelves of tobacco products infused with sweet, minty or fruity flavors has run into opposition from hookah sellers, who argue it could destroy a cherished tradition among Armenians, Arabs and other communities in which hookah has been a centerpiece of gatherings and celebrations.
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- Category: June 2021
Nguyen and colleagues set out to investigate the relationship between passive smoking and the risk of developing RA in a large prospective cohort of healthy French women. These results suggest that smoking by-products - whether actively or passively inhaled - could generate autoimmunity, at least towards antigens involved in RA pathogenesis. In a poster examining another link between the lungs and inflammatory arthritis (...)
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- Category: June 2021
Although the number of smokers has decreased in Bangladesh over the years, it is not adequate to make the country tobacco-free by 2040, Information Minister Hasan Mahmud has said at a workshop organised by VOICE with the members of Law Reporter’s Forum.
The workshop titled “The Necessity of Law Amendment” was held at Nasrul Hamid auditorium of Dhaka Reporter’s Unity on Wednesday.
Speaking as the chief guest, the minister said an impetuous anti-tobacco campaign is necessary to make the country tobacco-free.
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- Category: June 2021
The World Health Organisation’s decision last month to give a special award to India for banning the sale of e-cigarettes was proof that the agency has no intention of taking an ethical and evidence-based approach to tobacco harm reduction. This puts it squarely at odds with countries such as the UK and New Zealand which have successfully embraced vaping as part of their tobacco control strategy. The WHO has never pursued harm reduction policies in relation to smoking and in recent years has increasingly worked to stamp out e-cigarettes and (...)
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- Category: June 2021
International public health specialists, scientists, doctors, tobacco control experts and consumers are convening for the Global Forum on Nicotine 2021 (#GFN21) on 17 and 18 June in Liverpool, UK, and streaming free online, to highlight the vital role of safer nicotine products in the fight to reduce global smoking-related death and disease. To date, the world has lost an estimated 3.8 million people to COVID-19; a devastating figure that is, sadly, less than half the annual death toll from smoking . Every day, 1.1 billion smokers still light up around the world, a number that has stalled for over 20 years despite decades of tobacco control efforts. [...]
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- Category: June 2021
Imagine someone walking into a cafe, sitting down at a table and lighting up a cigarette. In the UK – and other countries where smoking in indoor public places is banned – that would be almost unthinkable. In the 15 years since smoking bans came into effect across Britain, smoking inside has gone from a fact of life to an aberration, and the nation’s health is all the better for it.
Strokes, heart problems and asthma attacks have all fallen since the bans were introduced, particularly among people who used to spend their working lives in smoky environments. [...]
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- Category: June 2021
Everyone knows that smoking is bad for your health, but it’s easy to presume that if you only smoke a little, or in social situations, then the risks won’t be as high. According to research by Dr Pallavi Balte and Dr Elizabeth Oelsner at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, the risk of lung cancer death for ‘social smokers’ – those who only smoke when with other people who are smoking – is not significantly lower than those who smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day.
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- Category: June 2021
New Zealand's war on tobacco and its ill-fated smoke-free goal for 2025 is causing poorer Kiwi smokers more harm than good.
With the country's tobacco prices second only to Australia's as the most expensive in the world, the most vulnerable in society are resorting to reusing tobacco that has already been smoked.
As most reused tobacco is left at the very end of the cigarette, it will have already been contaminated further by the toxins in the smoke that attach to the unsmoked tobacco.
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- Category: June 2021
On April 24 last year, in the White House Briefing Room, President Donald J. Trump, a man with no scientific or medical qualifications to his name, mused aloud on the (unsurprisingly, highly dangerous) idea of injecting bleach as a treatment for COVID-19. A side camera showed the face of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx as she listened. As Trump continued [...] she did not contradict him, later citing her military training as the reason for her silence. At the eighth annual Global Forum on Nicotine—streaming free online from the UK this week—parallels between the politicization of COVID and that of nicotine science will be under discussion.