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- Category: May 2020
For World No Tobacco Day 2020, an international group of independent experts with no conflicting links to the tobacco or vaping industry has sharply criticized the World Health Organization for its backward-looking approach to innovation and new technology, such as vaping products. Experts say they are exasperated by the WHO’s dogmatic hostility towards new technology and fear the U.N. health agency will squander the opportunity to avoid millions of premature deaths that will be caused by smoking.
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- Category: May 2020
Māori and Pasifika who have not been able to quit smoking may need more support to move from smoking to vaping, researchers from the University of Otago and Māori public health collective Hāpai Te Hauora have found. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 16 people who identified as Māori or Pacific ethnicity, or both, who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime, and who currently used electronic nicotine delivery systems (also known as e-cigarettes or vapes).
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- Category: May 2020
On June 1, the South African government plans to ease the lockdown restrictions and will allow limited alcohol sales, keeping bars shuttered yet permitting home consumption. However, the tobacco ban—which includes not only cigarettes but all tobacco harm reduction products, like vapes and snus—remains in effect and has no real end in sight.
Now, a recently released and robust study out of the University of Cape Town seems to show exactly what government skeptics and much of the public have been insisting all along: that prohibition doesn’t work. [...]
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- Category: May 2020
The vaping industry is demanding to be allowed to sell its products online and for delivery during lockdown level3. They also want to be disassociated from the tobacco sector.
Vapour Products Association of South Africa (VPASA) chief executive Asanda Gcoyi told The Star that the narrative that vapour products, cigarettes and tobacco products were the same was problematic. “Vaping is not smoking, those are two different things. Both vaping and cigarettes contain nicotine, but nicotine is not what kills people in smoking, people die because of the tar,” she said.
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- Category: May 2020
The number of young people smoking rose for the first time in a decade last year, while the popularity of e-cigarettes rose by half, according to a report by the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Health Promotion Administration (HPA) the Thursday (May 28).
In 2019, an estimated 81,000 youths smoked traditional tobacco cigarettes, while 57,000 young Taiwanese had adopted the habit of vaping, CNA reported. The survey found that the proportion of junior high school students with a smoking habit rose from 2.8 percent in 2018 to 3 percent in 2019, [...]
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- Category: May 2020
WHO is publishing 3 reports to inform countries on the current state of scientific knowledge, and regulatory and policy options available on novel tobacco products such as electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), electronic non-nicotine delivery systems (ENNDS) and heated tobacco products (HTPs). [...] This year’s theme is “protecting youth from industry manipulation and preventing them from nicotine and tobacco use”, and it poses important questions on how the public health community can protect youth from novel products.
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- Category: May 2020
New US research has found that individuals who use e-cigarettes could be at risk of developing oral diseases in the future, which could range from gum disease to cancer.
[...] the new study looked at a group of 123 people with no signs of oral disease. The group included 25 smokers, 25 non-smokers, 20 e-cigarette users, 25 former tobacco smokers who used e-cigarettes and 28 people who smoked both tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes. "Vaping is such a big assault on the oral environment, and the change happens dramatically and over a short period of time," said Purnima Kumar, senior author of the study.
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- Category: May 2020
Millions of e-cigarette users, or vapers, across the globe are celebrating World Vape Day on May 30, 2020, a day before World No Tobacco Day. World Vape Day aims to raise awareness on e-cigarettes or vapes and encourage smokers who are unable to quit on their own or with currently available smoking cessation tools to switch to safer nicotine products.
“Safer nicotine products, such as e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products, are the most disruptive influence on smoking in decades.These are the innovations that have the potential to save millions of lives [...]
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- Category: May 2020
EU member states will ask the European Commission this week to place novel tobacco products, electronic cigarettes and heated tobacco products under the EU Tobacco Excise Directive, meaning they would be taxed just like traditional tobacco products [...]
“The current provisions of Directive 2011/64/EU have become less effective, as they are either no longer sufficient or too narrow to address current and future challenges, concerning some products, such as liquids for e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products and other types of next-generation products, which are entering the market,” the draft conclusions read.
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- Category: May 2020
Approaches to smoking in lockdown are similarly divisive. More than a quarter of smokers in France said their tobacco consumption increased during lockdown, and the South African government's attempt to ban cigarette sales during coronavirus immediately resulted in a black market for tobacco products. For people like Ellie, however, being quarantined with family is simply not conducive to a nicotine habit. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. "I wonder if, when post-lockdown life begins, will I pick up the cigarettes again?" she says. "Or will I be able to go without?"
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- Category: May 2020
Switzerland is at the bottom of the class in Europe when it comes to preventing young people from smoking. It is the only country, apart from Kosovo, that does not have a national minimum age for the purchase of these products.
What’s more, the tobacco and nicotine industry has updated its range of products and now offers new flavoured products that appeal to young people, particularly because of their colourful packaging, the Swiss Association for the Prevention of Tobacco Addiction said [...] on Tuesday.
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- Category: May 2020
The tobacco giant Philip Morris has taken advantage of the UK’s ban on menthol cigarettes to promote its new tobacco product, despite heavy restrictions on advertising tobacco.
In the run up to the ban the company hired sales reps to promote its menthol heated tobacco products directly to newsagents, one of the only legal ways it can advertise in the UK, where almost all tobacco advertising is banned. It also offered promotional menthol kits and trials for new customers, with half-price tobacco sticks in any of its four menthol flavours.
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- Category: May 2020
The UAE’s Federal Tax Authority (FTA) has decided to postpone the implementation of the ban on supplying, transferring, storing, and possessing water pipe tobacco and electrically heated cigarettes that do not carry digital tax stamps within the UAE to January 1, 2021. “This extension on the timeline provides them with seven additional months to prepare for the mandatory implementation of the ban,” said FTA director-general Khaled Ali Al Bustani.
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- Category: May 2020
In Pakistan smoking is one of the leading causes of avoidable death. According to World Health Organization (WHO) use of tobacco is currently responsible for the death of one in ten grown-ups’ world widely. If this continues death rate will be doubled and more lives will impulsively develop tobacco related diseases that lead to long-lasting disabilities. Individuals who smoke cigarettes are fifteen times more expose to death due to lung cancer.
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- Category: May 2020
Vaping is most heavily concentrated in U.S. schools with a higher proportion of white students, schools in the South and West, and schools where more students smoke cigarettes, a new University of Michigan study shows.
Overall, more than one in 10 American middle and high school students report having used e-cigarettes within the last month. In certain schools, as many as 60% of students said they vaped during that time.
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- Category: May 2020
Although it may have eclipsed our memories, COVID-19 is not the first disease outbreak that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has faced in the last three months.
It was as late as Feb. 25 — well after the first novel coronavirus case in the United States was reported — that CDC updated its numbers on what it called the EVALI (e-cigarette, or vaping-associated lung illness) outbreak. On that day, while COVID-19 was silently spreading throughout the country, CDC announced that this “e-cigarette”-related disease had caused 2,807 hospitalizations and claimed 68 lives. [...]
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- Category: May 2020
The governor of New Mexico said last week that the state needs to explore every option for economic relief, and that includes passing marijuana legalization. [...] Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) was asked whether she was in favor of the legislature passing adult-use legalization during an upcoming special session to generate tax revenue to offset financial challenges caused by the pandemic. “Let’s end on a high note,” the governor joked, adding that she felt suspensions of various capital projects due to the health crisis “likely would not have occurred” if lawmakers had legalized recreational marijuana [...]
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- Category: May 2020
Neither the South African nor the Indian government has made any serious effort to rationalise the ban on tobacco and e-cigarettes. As the evidence mounts that nicotine may help ward off the coronavirus, prohibiting these products on health grounds looks tenuous at best. Some have suggested that allowing people to drink and smoke discourages social distancing, but with South Africans now buying booze and cigarettes from strangers on street corners, this reasoning also looks shaky.
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- Category: May 2020
Last week, the UK banned the sale of menthol cigarettes, menthol filters and papers, and skinny cigarettes, in an effort to stop young people from smoking. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said menthol cigarettes are more harmful than other cigarettes, but their sale continues in the US as well as in India. Menthol cigarettes have a similar design to regular cigarettes, but use menthol additives either mixed with the tobacco or within/near the cigarette filter to release a burst of menthol flavor when inhaled.
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- Category: May 2020
About 2.2 million people in the UK may be smoking more than usual during the coronavirus crisis despite the serious harm it does to respiratory and immune systems, a survey has suggested.
A further 4.8 million are approximated to be smoking the same amount as before the pandemic, while 1.9 million are believed to have cut down, according to estimates calculated from a representative study of about 2,000 people over 30 April to 13 May in YouGov’s Covid-19 tracker.