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- Category: October 2018
"Cigarette" might appear in the term "e-cigarette" but that is as far as their similarities extend, reports a new Northwestern Medicine report published Friday, [...] Assuming e-cigarettes are equal to cigarettes could lead to misguided research and policy initiatives, the paper says.
"Comparing cigarettes to e-cigarettes can give us a false sense of what dangers exist because it misses the gap in understanding how people use them and how they can make people dependent," said first author Matthew Olonoff [...]
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- Category: October 2018
Philip Morris International has filed a lawsuit against the South Korean government, demanding the disclosure of detailed information on Seoul’s recent test results of harmful substances found in electronic cigarettes.
The lawsuit against the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety follows its announcement in June that five cancer-causing substances were found in heated tobacco products, with the level of tar detected in some of them far exceeding that of conventional cigarettes.
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- Category: October 2018
Seventy leading public health experts and anti-tobacco campaigners have urged the World Health Organization to adopt a more sympathetic attitude to ecigarettes and other alternatives to smoking, “which have the potential to bring the epidemic of smoking-caused disease to a more rapid conclusion”.
Their joint letter to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, is intended to influence this week’s conference of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in Geneva, which frames international health policy on the issue.
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- Category: October 2018
Ireland risks missing its tobacco-free target date of 2025 by 27 years, the HSE has warned.
The shocking delay is putting new pressure on Health Minister Simon Harris to soften his stance on e-cigarettes to help more smokers quit.
The Government is committed to being "tobacco-free" - with less than 5pc of the population still smokers - by 2025.
But the HSE report says that, based on current trends, this target will not be met until 2052.
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- Category: October 2018
As delegates gather for the World Health Organization's (WHO) biennial conference on tobacco, the authors of a new report, "No Fire, No Smoke: Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction," are fiercely criticizing the WHO's record. The public health experts accuse the WHO of failing to comply with international treaty obligations to back reduced-harm alternatives to smoking. They deplore that the WHO instead recommends bans on e-cigarettes—a move that has been implemented by dozens of countries.
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- Category: October 2018
Tobacco sustains 50 million livelihoods in India and earns substantial revenue through exports and tax, but it also kills a million citizens every year and mounts an economic burden of over Rs 1 lakh crore in direct and indirect costs.
Caught between these two competing forces are the country’s 27 crore users who find themselves pushed to the frontlines in the state’s half-hearted war against tobacco.
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- Category: October 2018
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Saturday vetoed a proposed ban on smoking at state parks and beaches for the third year in a row.
Three bills passed by state legislators would have imposed $25 fines on the use of tobacco, marijuana and e-cigarettes at parks and beaches, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The measures cited wildfire concerns and public health as reasons to ban smoking in those outdoor areas.
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- Category: October 2018
Every two years, the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control meet to discuss how to advance the treaty. [...]
I was one of those agitating for the FCTC back in 1999-2003. Generally, the FCTC doesn’t do what normal international treaties do – address some transboundary issue like climate change, international trade or intellectual property. It tries to establish norms for regulation of tobacco commerce within countries – a kind of solidarity mechanism for national anti-tobacco policy.