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- Category: January 2020
“PECIA and our 250 members do not claim e-cigarettes are smoking-cessation devices. We mandate our members to be responsible entrepreneurs by observing ethical business practices and ensuring the proper use of e-cigarettes as a lifestyle choice among adults looking for a less-harmful alternative to conventional cigarettes,” said the association’s president Joey Dulay in a letter. Last month, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, announced a ban on the use and import of e-cigarettes, saying that anyone caught using the products will be arrested.
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- Category: January 2020
To complement the wide range of information on the potential dangers of vaping, the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine has developed a new learning module for high school classrooms that encourages students to directly test the effects of e-cigarette vapor on living cells.
"We created this module in direct response to the vaping epidemic spreading among teens and children," said Dr. Donna Cassidy-Hanley, senior research associate [...]
New survey shows funding shortages for local tobacco control could put smokefree 2030 target at risk
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- Category: January 2020
A new survey from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and Cancer Research UK finds that achieving the Government’s target of reaching a smokefree England by 2030 is threatened by a lack of funding for tobacco control.
As a result of the cuts, a third of local authorities (31%) no longer provide a specialist stop smoking service, with three quarters (74%) of all local authorities citing pressure on budgets as a threat to their tobacco work. These year-on-year cuts meant that total local authority spending on vital stop smoking services and tobacco control declined by 36% between 2014/15 and 2018/19.
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- Category: January 2020
E-cigarette company Relx Technology said on Saturday it will open 10,000 stores globally over the next three years in a big expansion for the Chinese vaping startup.
Relx currently has more than 1,400 stores globally, the majority of which are located in China and run by third-parties.
The company’s retail outlets, as it expands, will be a combination of company-owned stores such as its first flagship store in China, unveiled at a news conference on Saturday, and franchised locations. The new Shanghai store is a sleek 140-square-meter shop in the Nanjing West Road shopping district.
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- Category: January 2020
BAT Kenya has raised the prices of nearly all of its cigarettes by up to Sh15 per packet in changes the company said are meant to pass increased taxes to consumers.
The price increments took effect on January 2. The Finance Act 2019 raised excise duty charged on cigarettes by 14.1 percent effective last November. The Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed firm said the higher taxes have made cigarettes made in Kenya expensive, adding that this has, in turn, fuelled smuggling of cheap products from neighbouring countries.
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- Category: January 2020
In Canada, the government of British Columbia is cracking down on vaping products. The plan is to reduce nicotine content, limit access to flavoured pods, mandate plain packaging with health warnings and raise the tax on vaping products to 20 per cent. The rationale is simple. E-cigarettes have exploded in popularity around the world in recent years, especially among teens. Between 2011 and 2018, the proportion of high school students in the United States that use e-cigarettes increased more than 10-fold to 20.8 per cent from 1.5 per cent.
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- Category: January 2020
More than 30 Senate Democrats on Monday criticized the Trump administration’s new vaping ban for exempting menthol flavored e-cigarettes and any e-liquids that are not in a cartridge.
In a letter [...] said the omissions in the policy will place millions of children at risk of addiction.
“The newly announced e-cigarette flavors policy, which represents an alarming reversal from what the Administration promised, is weak and unlikely to have a meaningful impact on e-cigarette use by youth,” the Democrats wrote.
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- Category: January 2020
The Food and Drug Administration is in distress. The agency is still the world’s leading regulator of food and medical products, responsible for ensuring the safety of some $2.6 trillion in consumer goods each year. That represents 20 cents of every dollar that Americans spend. But critics both inside and outside the sprawling agency say that the F.D.A.’s standards have been slipping for some time.
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- Category: January 2020
As smokers know all too well, nicotine is highly addictive. It's hard to quit smoking, a habit that claims the lives of more than seven million people each year.
Smoking tobacco delivers nicotine to the neuroreceptors responsible for addiction, affecting the nervous system and causing addiction.
A new study, led by scientists from the University of Bristol, into the molecular interactions involved has revealed how these neuroreceptors respond to nicotine.
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- Category: January 2020
January 11th, 1964. The US Surgeon General announces: smoking is killing us. It’s an announcement that changed the course of American public health – and took years to finally come out. But it was only the beginning of an uphill battle to take down an all-American pastime. This week we ask: why did it take so long for the public to learn this deadly truth? And why has it taken even longer for us to accept it? [...]
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- Category: January 2020
Basically, the major selling point for snus is that it’s a way of getting a nicotine hit, without also having to actually take smoke into your lungs. That can mean a significant amount of harm reduction, as much of the damage of smoking comes from inhaling the smoke itself. It also makes nicotine consumption possible any time, anywhere. In theory, vaping inside workplaces isn’t banned like smoking is, but in practice many organisations and venues don’t allow it.
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- Category: January 2020
Ask any vaper why they do it, and you'll probably hear a similar answer: "It's not a lifestyle choice. It's life or death."
That phrase, for all its political hokiness, has become something of their refrain—chanted at protests, shouted at speeches, plastered all over their insular Twitter world. It's a sentiment, they know, not everybody shares. Just last week, U-Haul announced that it would be implementing a new policy not to hire nicotine users, regardless of how they consumed it. But there's a distinction between vaping and smoking, vapers say; that's precisely their point.
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- Category: January 2020
U-Haul? More like U-Hate. The ubiquitous moving-and-storage company has made clear that it hates workers who use nicotine—even on their own time.
At the turn of the year, U-Haul announced that starting in February, they will “decline job applicants who are nicotine users” in the 21 states* where it’s legal to do so. And it doesn’t matter if the nicotine comes from a cigarette, a patch, gum or a vape.
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- Category: January 2020
There has been a lot of talk in the U.S. about legalizing recreational cannabis, and about cannabis’ potential to help with health issues.
Scientists working in medicine may have a lot to discover about cannabis’ ability to improve health. However, the medical community does know that short-term health consequences of cannabis use include impaired short-term memory, impaired attention, impaired coordination and sleep problems. In our recent study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, my colleagues and I wanted to describe topics of conversations pertaining to cannabis use. [...]
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- Category: January 2020
In line with arguments by countless public health experts, in response to the nationwide e-cig ban recently passed by Parliament, Indian doctors are concerned about the resulting likely increase in cancers and chronic heart and lung diseases, as former smokers who vape to quit cigarettes, may now turn back to smoking.
Last Summer, the Union Health Ministry had prepared the Prohibition of E-cigarettes Ordinance 2019, which was sent to the Cabinet for review. [...]
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- Category: January 2020
Cigarettes kill more people each year than our enemies did in the nation’s wars over the last seven decades. For that to change, existing cigarette smokers would need to quit or obtain nicotine through something less dangerous. Enter electronic cigarettes [...] or Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS). [...] E-cigarettes have the potential to assist in reducing or eliminating use of traditional tobacco cigarettes. It is important, however, that America’s youth not gain access to these products. Fur-thermore, legislators and public health officials must be serious about the potential risks of vaping marijuana.
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- Category: January 2020
Juul Labs Inc. received roughly 2,600 complaints about adverse health effects related to its e-cigarette during its first three years in operation, with customers citing issues such as burning sensations in the lungs, blistered lips and vomiting, according to an internal report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. [...] The rate of complaints received per Juul pods sold “is very low,” said Austin Finan, a Juul spokesman. “We take product safety very seriously and implement stringent quality control measures to ensure the safety of all our products.”
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- Category: January 2020
The American Heart Association (AHA), when discussing e cigarettes, warns that e cigarette use, “is a dangerous trend with real health risks”, and that, “e cigarettes should not be promoted as a safe alternative to smoking.” Is this the case? [...] Why on earth are the AHA trying to deceive and to deter people from trying a product which has been proven to be effective in helping smokers ease away from the habit of smoking and into stopping smoking completely? It makes no sense whatsoever for an organisation, whose stated aim is to help people away from the smoking habit, [...]
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- Category: January 2020
Justin Byron is an Assistant Professor in Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He uses behavioral science to learn how to improve health communication to support health policies in the US and abroad. He focuses on tobacco control, especially e-cigarette taxes in Indonesia and nicotine reduction policies in the US. Dr. Byron earned his MHS and PhD at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
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- Category: January 2020
HEALTH MINISTER SIMON Harris has been sharply critical of the tobacco industry in its approach to marketing e-cigarettes and vaping products.
Summing up the results of the Health Behaviours in School-aged Children (HBSC) 2018 study, Harris said:
“We’re seeing fewer children in Ireland smoke, we’re seeing fewer children in Ireland that use cannabis, [...] Although there was a five-percentage-point drop in children aged 10-17 who had tried smoking, Harris expressed concern that 22% of 12-17 year olds said they had tried vaping, and that 9% said they had tried it in the past 30 days.