Glowing testimony
New research by scientists at British American Tobacco indicates that the company’s commercial tobacco heating product (THP), glo, has less of an impact on indoor air quality than does cigarette smoke.
The results of the research were presented on Saturday at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco in Florence, Italy, and were the subject of a press note.
THPs heated rather than burnt tobacco and so they had the potential to reduce the number and levels of toxicants in emissions from those produced by traditional combustible cigarettes, the note said. In addition, the enclosed design of THPs and their lower operating temperatures meant they did not produce emissions between puffs.
The scientists analysed the indoor air quality of an environmentally controlled room containing four study subjects using THPs at fixed intervals over four hours. Air from the room was sampled and analysed for known tobacco smoke markers, and the results were compared with those from a control room and a room containing the same four volunteers but smoking cigarettes.
The air was analysed for the nine types of harmful components that the World Health Organization recommends should be reduced, the press note said. Of these, in the room in which the THPs were used, seven toxicants were either not detected at all or were present at the same levels as in the control room, where nobody used any product at all.
The remaining two toxicants (formaldehyde and acetaldehyde) were found to be present at significantly reduced levels compared to the room in which cigarettes were smoked.
Fewer traces of nicotine were detected in the THP room, compared to the amounts found in the cigarette room. And the concentration of particles in the THP room was also reduced (and closer to that of the control room) compared to the concentration found in the cigarette room.
“These data show reduced toxicant emissions compared to cigarette smoke which indicates that glo has the potential to considerably reduce exposure to toxicants relative to cigarette smoke,” Dr Chuan Liu, head of discovery, THP science at BAT, was quoted as saying.
