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- Category: November 2022
In a bid to address health inequality and family poverty, a council in the United Kingdom will soon be handing out free vapes to pregnant people who smoke.
Lambeth Council, a local authority in South London, already runs pregnancy smoking cessation services, which include behavioral support, counseling and access to nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) like patches. But it announced in October that it will now also provide e-cigarettes as a way to help pregnant people and those who care for children. The program will begin in a few weeks.
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- Category: November 2022
Social media sites like Instagram are popular platforms for advertisers looking to target a massive user base of young people. One unintended consequence for app owner Meta Platforms Inc., though, is that’s also made the app an ideal vehicle for illegal marijuana sellers.
New York last week became the latest state to issue licenses to legally sell recreational cannabis, taking steps to regulate and tax an industry where a gray market of illicit storefronts has thrived. It aims to follow other states with legalized pot that have issued tight constraints on pot advertising akin to rules regarding alcohol and tobacco marketing — especially those targeting people under age 21.
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- Category: November 2022
Quitting cigarettes is one of the hardest things to do, as many former and current smokers know from painful personal experience. Public health and politicians must do better to help smokers quit. 700,000 deaths per year in the EU should be enough of an incentive to make us rethink our current approach. To effectively help smokers quit for good, three conditions must be met:
Firstly, smokers must be able to choose from as many options as possible to find out what smoking cessation method works best for them. People are different, and therefore different ways to give up smoking must be made available and affordable. [...]
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- Category: November 2022
Decades of research shows that constituents other than nicotine are the harmful agents in tobacco products. This knowledge is incorporated into the nicotine regulatory policies of countries leading in tobacco control, such as the UK and New Zealand. Alternative nicotine products, such as nicotine replacement therapy and e-cigarettes, are now endorsed in the UK by a number of healthcare bodies in a tobacco harm reduction approach that encourages tobacco users to completely switch to a less risky nicotine containing product. [...]
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- Category: November 2022
To make tobacco-free Bangladesh as per the commitment of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the law structure needs to be strengthened, and the factors that are encouraging public need to be prohibited, said speakers at a discussion Wednesday.
They also noted that Designated Smoking Areas (DSA), displaying smoking scenes in movies on condition, and CSR by tobacco companies must be outlawed. [...] Dr Atiur Rahman highlighted that policymakers have not only played a notable role in reducing tobacco consumption in Bangladesh and the citizens but also provided significant support to anti-tobacco movements.
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- Category: November 2022
The EU is to propose a bloc-wide vaping levy as part of a shake-up of taxation on the tobacco industry that would also double excise duties in member states with low cigarette taxes, according to a draft European Commission document.
The changes to legislation, part of a push by Brussels to cut smoking rates, will increase the EU’s minimum excise duty on cigarettes from €1.80 to €3.60 per pack of 20, which would raise prices in eastern European nations where packs can sell for under €3.
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- Category: November 2022
Anew paper, published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), argues that older adults who smoke are “forgotten,” and that more needs to be done to address “the incredible burden of disease and death that this population carries.”
“The number of adults aged 65 years and older is expected to more than double worldwide over the next several decades, and for the first time in record history, older adults will outnumber children,” write the authors, Annie Kleykamp of BAK and Associates and Jessica Kulak of the University of Buffalo. [...]
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- Category: November 2022
Claims over the weekend that the EU planned to bring in a new tax which will nearly double the price of Swedish 'snus' tobacco led to the hashtag #Swexit trending over the weekend. But a commission spokesman stressed on Monday that the story was inaccurate.
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- Category: November 2022
“A smoke-free future is just the beginning of fulfilling our mission,” said CEO of PMI Jacek Olzcak.
“We are committed to ultimately having a net positive impact on society, and to that end, we are diligently working to expand our purpose, evolving in the long term into a broader lifestyle, consumer wellness, and healthcare company.”
Olzcak added that in 10 years, cigarettes “should be placed in a museum.”
Moreover, he said that the company aims to have 50% of its total net revenue come from smoke-free products by 2025.
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- Category: November 2022
On top of their other health hazards, electronic cigarettes may help rot your teeth, a new study suggests.
Vaping appears to promote cavities, which can result in tooth loss if not treated quickly, experts say.
"If you are vaping, be aware that there are potentially some detrimental oral health effects," said lead researcher Dr. Karina Irusa, an assistant professor of comprehensive care at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston.
"If you do vape, make sure to mention this to your dentist because it may be important to make sure we customize your preventive routine to be a bit more aggressive than we would do for the average patient," she said.
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- Category: November 2022
The complex biochemistry that sees coca plants make cocaine has been unpicked and replicated in a relative of the tobacco plant. Recreating the process by modifying other plants or microorganisms could lead to a way to manufacture the stimulant or produce chemically similar compounds with unique properties. Biochemists have tried to map out how cocaine is made by the coca plant for more than a century, both because of its unique structure and for its uses in medicine, [...]
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- Category: November 2022
Rates of cigarette smoking among young Americans have fallen from 35 percent to 12 percent over the past twenty years, according to new results of a Gallup poll.
The decline among those aged 18 through 29 was also more than double that of any other age group measured, and puts young adults as the second least likely age group to smoke cigarettes. The nation’s oldest adults—those over age 65— are the least likely to smoke cigarettes, and just 8 percent reported doing so in 2022.
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- Category: November 2022
So many Australian children are now addicted to nicotine from vaping that the federal health minister, Mark Butler, will propose reforms aimed at curtailing the e-cigarette industry.
Many children do not know they are consuming the highly addictive chemical until it is too late, experts say.
“The former government dropped the ball on vaping,” Butler told Guardian Australia. “Our children are paying the price for that division and delay.”
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- Category: November 2022
Empirical evidence, primarily based on hospital-based or voluntary samples, suggests that current smokers have a lower risk of COVID-19 infection than never smokers. In this study, we used nationally representative data to examine the association between tobacco use and the risk of having a confirmed COVID-19 case. We explored several forms of tobacco use, contributing to separate the role of nicotine from smoking. We used data from 44,199 participants from three pooled national health surveys in Finland (FinSote 2018-2020). [...]
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- Category: November 2022
The Ministry of Health is not striking the right balance between protecting young people from the harms of vaping and making vapes available for current smokers to use as a quit smoking tool says the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation of New Zealand.
The Foundation is concerned by recent comments from the Ministry of Health which reveal it has no plans to cap the number of specialist vape retailers or to reduce the nicotine levels allowed in vapes.
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- Category: November 2022
Swedish snus lovers are up in arms after the publication of a leaked document suggesting the EU wants to force Sweden to raise the tax on snus by 200 percent.
The document, which was seen by the Swedish daily Aftonbladet, contains proposals for a new excise tax on tobacco.
If the plan becomes reality, the price of a can of portioned snus could increase by approximately SEK34 ($3.26). The price of a can of loose snus would increase by approximately SEK62 compared to today. A can of General loose snus would cost over SEK120 under the proposal.
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- Category: November 2022
After China, India has the world's second-highest number of smokers – about 90 million. We know that long-term smoking is a major cause of cancer, heart disease, and debilitating respiratory diseases. Smoking kills more than obesity, alcohol, road accidents, drug misuse and HIV combined. As a result of smoking, millions of people die prematurely in agony or live in misery as they age. What should be done?
As it happens, there is good news and bad news. The good news is there has been a recent revolution in technology that could bring this epidemic of pain and sorrow to a rapid close. The bad news is that, like many revolutionary innovations, it is facing strong resistance.
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- Category: November 2022
Tobacco waste is one of the biggest sources of plastic pollution on the planet.
Trillions of cigarette butts are tossed, flicked and chucked away each year, littering the earth’s soil and seas with toxic chemicals and harmful man-made plastics.
However, this is fast being matched by another stream of waste: e-cigarettes.
Marketed as a less unhealthy alternative to tobacco smoking, vaping is posing a colossal threat to the environment.
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- Category: November 2022
Over the past decade, the Philippines has achieved a level of international best practice in its tobacco control policies. In 2015, when the number of current smokers went down from 17 million (2009) to 15.9 million, the World Health Organization (WHO) commended the country for achieving the largest number of smokers that quit in a short period of time in the Western Pacific.
Despite the great strides we’ve made in preventing Filipinos from smoking, we face a unique new challenge in the form of electronic nicotine and non-nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), otherwise known as e-cigarettes or vapes.
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- Category: November 2022
The city of Columbus is currently debating on banning the retail sale of flavored tobacco and vapor products and has hosted a series of public meetings and virtual hearings to allow all sides an opportunity to present the ramifications of such bans.
While the legislation is laudable in that it attempts to address youth use of age-restricted products, it fails to recognize the significant declines in youth cigarette and e-cigarette use, nor the reasons why kids are using e-cigarettes to begin with. Further, the legislation not only ignores the potential for e-cigarettes as a direct substitute to traditional cigarettes but would severely stunt adult access to these products, [...]