- Details
- Category: February 2022
Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the US. While e-cigarettes (EC) are undeniably harmful when used by adolescents and nonsmokers, the perpetuation of the increasing negative perceptions of EC and widespread false belief that EC are equal or more harmful than combustible cigarettes (CC) represents a significant missed public health opportunity. EC have great potential to serve as a mechanism for smoking harm reduction among hard-to-treat populations of smokers who have failed to quit with currently available treatments. [...]
- Details
- Category: February 2022
The cost of smoking to London is £3bn a year, according to new analysis, with numbers of smokers varying across the city. The finding comes from the charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), which puts the figure £800m higher than previously estimated. It found £308m is spent on healthcare, £150m on social care, and £41m on fires caused by smokers. Lost productivity costs London £2.5bn a year, a figure which takes into account smokers’ increased likelihood of missing work and earning less due to ill health.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
Young children touch everything [...] This makes them especially vulnerable to thirdhand smoke, the chemical residue from tobacco smoke left behind in dust and on surfaces after someone smokes or vapes.
Educating parents and other family members about reducing children’s exposure to thirdhand smoke through banning smoking in homes and cars is necessary, but a new study, published in JAMA Network Open, suggests these individual protective measures are not enough. “This study filled an important gap. We have done a lot of research about thirdhand smoke in private homes, cars, hotels, and casinos, but we haven’t had access to clinical populations,” said Georg Matt, [...]
- Details
- Category: February 2022
The extended interview with David Sweanor, talking about smoking cessation policy.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
While top tobacco regulators dawdle over the fate of the e-cigarette industry, another class of vape is quietly restocking the market with unregulated, flavored products — and it’s drawing in a growing number of kids.
To users, these vapes are identical. But because of an obscure loophole, they skirt the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory umbrella. Rather than containing tobacco-derived nicotine, the addictive stimulant found in traditional cigarette and vape products, these vapes have a lab-made version.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
The science on flavour bans appears to be hardening. Studies show if flavour bans are implemented, many vapers would likely return to smoking. And according to Dr. John Oyston, if Health Canada pushes a flavour ban into force, it could be “a public health disaster.”
- Details
- Category: February 2022
People using e-cigarettes to quit smoking found them to be less helpful than more traditional smoking cessations aids, a new study found. The study, published Monday in the journal BMJ, analyzed the latest 2017 to 2019 data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study, which follows tobacco use among Americans over time. "This is the first time we found e-cigarettes to be less popular than FDA-approved pharmaceutical aids, such as medications or the use of patches, gum, or lozenges," said John P. Pierce, the director for population sciences at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday announced a partnership aimed at raising awareness on the environmental and health impacts of microplastics in cigarette butts, the most discarded waste item worldwide. UNEP and the Secretariat of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) will launch a social media campaign to highlight the issue.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
Nurses have the power to spread the word about e-cigarette risks, according to Tiffany Klein, RN, BSN, Cancer Treatment Centers of America Atlanta.
Klein, who has experience in oncology and currently works on a pulmonology team, recently spoke to Oncology Nursing News® about her experience with electronic smoking and vaping, and how the rise of these activities can affect patients and nurses across various specialties.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
The intended vaping tax would represent a major blow to South African vaping consumers and smokers seeking less harmful alternatives to smoking. Such a tax would make smokers less likely to make the essential switch to less harmful alternatives due to price. On 15 December 2021, the treasury published a discussion paper titled Taxation of Electronic Nicotine and Non-Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS), after the minister of finance said in his 2020 February budget speech that the treasury would start the process to introduce an excise duty on electronic vapour products. In the paper, treasury notes that though the market for ENDS is still in (...)
- Details
- Category: February 2022
The head of a local health think tank has cautioned the government over its “ambitious” plans to ban the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products to those born after 2005.
Galen Centre for Health and Social Policy CEO Azrul Mohd Khalib said the decision was an ambitious one as it represented an almost immediate ban. Putrajaya, therefore, needed to be cautious and ensure it had the necessary buy-in and support from the public.
“This generational smoking ban represents an almost immediate ban, in effect, earlier than New Zealand,” he told FMT.
He said stronger and more effective enforcement would be vital for the ban to succeed.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
Little is known about sociodemographic and macro-level predictors of persistent smoking when one has developed a health condition that is likely caused by smoking. We investigate the impact of gender, education, and tobacco control policies (TCPs) on persistent smoking among older Europeans. Although women are less likely to smoke than men, they were more likely to smoke persistently. The effects of education and general TCPs on persistent smoking were significant for (...)
- Details
- Category: February 2022
On February 1, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted four nicotine vape manufacturers—Bidi Vapor, Diamond Vapor, Johnny Cooper and Vapor Unlimited—judicial stays on their marketing denial orders (MDOs) issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The decision means that these producers can continue selling their harm reduction products while the lawsuits remain active.
They followed dozens of other vape companies in taking legal action against the FDA, after the agency denied thousands of products through its new premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) pathway. [...]
- Details
- Category: February 2022
The Smoking in England research team at University College London have released the latest findings about vape trends in England. The team say: “Electronic cigarette use has become prevalent in many countries. In England, electronic cigarettes are currently regulated as consumer products. It is important to track use of electronic cigarettes and assess how far they appear to be promoting or detracting from reduction in prevalence of cigarette smoking.”
- Details
- Category: February 2022
People who use electronic cigarettes and test positive for COVID-19 have a higher frequency of experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, compared to people who don’t vape, according to new research from Mayo Clinic. “The study was designed to compare the frequency of common COVID-19 symptoms, such as loss of taste or smell, headache, muscle aches and chest tightness in COVID patients who vaped, compared with those who were not vapers,” says David McFadden, M.D., a Mayo Clinic internist and the study’s first author. “We interviewed more than 280 COVID-positive vapers and compared them with 1,445 COVID-positive people of the same age and gender, and who don’t vape. [...]
- Details
- Category: February 2022
Due to the stressful working environment faced by many Malaysians, it is not a surprise that some resort to the consumption of harmful products as a means of coping with their current lifestyle. In 2019, a total of 12 billion sticks of illicit cigarettes were sold, where Malaysia made up a staggering 62 per cent of worldwide sales of illegal cigarettes in that year. Therefore, imposing tough-on-harm policies may signify a detachment from the challenges and pressures faced by the (...)
- Details
- Category: February 2022
Sixteen million Filipino smokers will have an opportunity to switch to significantly less harmful products compared to combusted cigarettes, once President Rodrigo Duterte signs into law the vape bill which was recently ratified by Congress.
Consumer advocacy groups said the figure, representing nearly a quarter of the adult population in the country, pertains to the number of Filipinos who regularly use cigarettes and who now have a better chance to evade serious diseases if they quit or switch to less harmful products such as e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products (HTPs) which the vape bill aims to regulate.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
A federal appeals court on Monday weighed whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration wrongly barred a flavored e-cigarette manufacturer from marketing its products, in a case that could curtail the regulator's efforts to combat youth vaping. The FDA had viewed e-cigarettes as having some promise to help adult smokers transition from conventional cigarettes, but (...)
- Details
- Category: February 2022
A growing number of GPs are prescribing nicotine vaping products to people who want to quit smoking after restrictions around the importation of e-cigarettes were tightened and large fines introduced for illegally selling or importing the products. [...] But there are claims that gaps in the system have allowed some telehealth doctors to provide 12 months’ worth of prescriptions to patients.
Data from the Department of Health shows the number of GPs approved as authorised prescribers of nicotine vaping products rose from 27 in July 2021 to 354 in October that year and 618 in January.
- Details
- Category: February 2022
Earlier this month, China's tobacco regulator issued draft vape laws which amend the tobacco monopoly law in place to include e-cigarettes, allowing the government the opportunity to revolutionize global tobacco harm reduction. The tobacco authority added that it will establish a “unified national electronic cigarette transaction management platform” that all licensed e-cigarette wholesalers and retailers must sell products through,” while tax collection and payment of e-cigarettes, “shall be implemented in accordance with national taxation laws and regulations.”