Author: Staff Writer

Sri Lanka’s health minister, Maithripala Sirisena, has said he is prepared to face up to any challenge that the fight against smoking might throw up, according to a story in the Daily News.

Addressing a gathering after an “anti-smoking walk” in Colombo on Monday, he said, “No one will be able to stop our fight against smoking.”

“I have many challenges and threats as the health minister, but my effort to save over 20,000 Sri Lankans who die annually due to smoking will not be stopped,” he added.

The story said that laws were being prepared that would require cigarette manufacturers to include graphic health warnings covering 80 percent of packs.

It wasn’t clear whether this meant 80 percent of the total surface area, or 80 percent of one or more sides.

Anti-tobacco proposals have been put forward in the UAE that would impose “plain packaging” on cigarettes and double the price of tobacco products within two years, according to a Gulf News story quoting a health ministry official.

And these are perhaps more than proposals. “The law is expected to be enforced throughout the GCC by 2016,” said Dr. Wedad Al Maidour, head of the ministry’s National Tobacco Control.

Wedad was quoted as saying that it had been proposed that the warning on cigarette packs should be increased to cover 70 percent of the pack, whereas at present it took up half of the pack. It was not clear whether this meant 70/50 percent of the pack or 70/50 percent of one or more sides of the pack.

And Wedad appealed to governments to help raise the price of tobacco products. Cigarettes and tobacco were very cheap in the GCC, she said, where a pack of 20 cost just AED7.

In comparison a pack cost £8 (AED48) in the U.K., where tax on tobacco was regularly increased.

A three-month anti-tobacco campaign on Bangladeshi television is seeking to create awareness about the adverse impacts of tobacco and motivate people to abide by the provisions of the country’s new tobacco control act, according to a story in The Financial Express quoting a UNB news agency report.

The campaign, which is said to have been organized by Progga (Knowledge for Progress) and supported financially by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Bloomberg Philanthropists, will appear on five private television channels.

The new control act, called the Smoking and Use of Tobacco Products Control (Amendment) Act, 2013, provides for three months imprisonment and a fine of BDT100,000 for those found to have published or broadcast tobacco advertisements; so just about the only television exposure people will have to tobacco products will be through the campaign.

Sales of cigarettes in France, which dropped about 7.6 percent last year, were impacted by high taxes and, to a lesser extent, the growing popularity of e-cigarettes, according to an Agence France Presse story.

Pascal Montredon, the head of the French association of tobacco shop owners, blamed the drop in sales on recent tax hikes.

Later this month the third tax hike in a little over one year will go into effect, at which point 80 centimes will have been added to the price of a pack of cigarettes.

The price of the most popular brand will have risen by about 11 percent to €7, while the price of the cheapest brand will have gone up by about 12 percent to €6.50.

Montredon said the high prices had encouraged the expansion of illegal imports, which he estimated as accounting for nearly one in four of the cigarettes smoked in France.

The growing popularity of e-cigarettes, which for the moment were tolerated in many places where smoking was banned, must have had an impact, added Montredon, but not as big an impact as the parallel market had had.

The Philippine tobacco company Mighty Corp. has said it will promote the use of tobacco dust as an organic fertilizer and pesticide so as to help at least 3 million tobacco farmers and their families earn more money than they currently earn, according to a story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

“We are going to help the National Tobacco Administration (NTA) promote the use of tobacco dust by our millions of fishermen all over the country,” said Oscar P. Barrientos, executive vice president of Mighty Corp., in a statement.

“This means an exponential increase in the purchase of tobacco dust.

“We are helping both tobacco farmers increase their yield and fishermen increase their catch.”

The NTA has for some time been promoting the use of tobacco dust as an organic fertilizer that acts too as a pesticide to control the increase in the population of snails and other predators in fish ponds.

An extra business rate that has been levied on Scotland’s larger shops selling alcohol and tobacco will end in 2015, according to a BBC Online story quoting Scottish ministers.

The news was welcomed by the Scottish Retail Consortium (SRC), which has opposed the tax.

The levy was aimed at larger retailers selling alcohol and tobacco, mainly supermarkets, to make them contribute to public health measures.

Retailers say that about 240 stores have had to pay a business rates bill 28 percent higher than the equivalent store in England.

The levy is expected to have raised about £95m during the three years that it will have been in place.

A Scottish government statement said it had made it clear the levy would last for one spending review period only and that 2014–2015 would be the final year.

“That has always been the position and is clearly set out in legislation,” it said.

Philip Morris International said today that it was investing up to €500 million in a manufacturing facility and associated pilot plant near Bologna, Italy, to produce its potentially reduced-risk tobacco products.

The combined annual production capacity of the factory and pilot plant is expected to reach 30 billion units by 2016.

“The development and commercialization of reduced-risk products represents a significant step toward achieving the public health objective of harm reduction, a potential paradigm shift for the industry, and an important growth opportunity for PMI,” said CEO André Calantzopoulos.

“This first factory investment is a milestone in our roadmap toward making these products available to adult smokers.

“This investment underscores our strong commitment to Italy and in particular to the Bologna region, which is not only home to our state-of-the-art filter factory, Intertaba, located in Zola Predosa, but also offers great infrastructure and, most importantly, access to exceptional human talent.”

Construction on the new facility is expected to begin immediately and take about two years.

Once fully operational it will employ up to 600 people.

The pilot plant, which is already near completion, will serve as the production facility for pilot and initial market launches.

“Importantly, the majority of the construction and manufacturing equipment will be procured from Italian companies and further benefit the country’s economy,” PMI said in a note posted on its website.

“PMI’s investment in the development and rigorous scientific assessment of products with the potential to reduce the risks of smoking spans more than a decade. It encompasses a wide range of tobacco and non-tobacco-containing product platforms. In November 2013 PMI announced its plans to accelerate commercialization of one of its potentially reduced-risk products in the second half of 2014 in selected cities, prior to a full market launch in 2015. Specific markets for product launches will be announced at a later date.

“Separately, PMI in December 2013 established a strategic framework with Altria Group Inc. under which Altria will make available its e-cigarette products exclusively to PMI for commercialization outside the United States. PMI plans to enter the e-cigarette market in the second half of 2014.”

New graphic warnings on cigarette packs sold in Jordan are likely to be ineffectual, according to a straw poll conducted by The Jordan Times on Sunday.

Since the beginning of this year the Ministry of Health has required tobacco manufacturers to place bigger graphic warnings on cigarette packs as part of the country’s obligations under the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

The images are said to be aimed at raising awareness among smokers about the diseases caused by tobacco smoking and smoking’s effect on the surrounding environment.

Although the piece in the Jordan Times might not have had the intellectual rigor of a scientific study, it provided graphic insights into the thinking of ordinary smokers.

Comments included: “Whatever they are going to place on the tobacco packs, I will not quit smoking unless I want to.”

Also: “These pictorials have no effect. I open the pack and smoke a cigarette without paying any attention to the images.”

And: “I don’t care what pictures they put on the cigarette packet. I started smoking when I was 18, and I haven’t stopped since then.”

This last quote was made by somebody who said that smoking for him was a pleasure.

The health ministry said the new graphic images were adopted after a study conducted by the King Hussein Cancer Centre’s cancer control office indicated that they would increase the motivation of about 25 percent of smokers to quit.

The full story is at http://jordantimes.com/article/anti-tobacco-pictorials-fail-to-sway-smokers.

A new report indicates that one in 10 smokers in Victoria, Australia, do not connect tobacco smoking with certain illnesses usually associated with smoking.

According to a report by Amy Bainbridge for the Australian Broadcasting Corp., Cancer Council Victoria (CCV) has published its new research to mark the anniversary of the publication of the 1964 report by the U.S. surgeon general into smoking and health.

The survey of 4,500 Victorians was conducted by the charity and was said to have included a cross-section of smokers and nonsmokers.

CCV’s Todd Harper was quoted as saying that about a quarter of the smokers surveyed could not “spontaneously say that heart attacks were caused by smoking.”

He said also that the survey data showed that less than 10 percent of current smokers could connect smoking with “asthma, gangrene, eye problems or pregnancy problems.”

And only half of all smokers surveyed could “spontaneously link smoking with lung cancer.”

“Given that smoking still kills 15,000 people every year, given that smoking will kill one in two long-term users, I think it shows the importance and the urgency of keeping up the fight on tobacco,” said Harper.

“We can’t assume for a second that this job is done when we have 15,000 a year in Australia dying because of smoking.”

Shares in Imperial Tobacco and British American Tobacco fell earlier this week in London after traders said a story in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper had reported that health authorities in China aimed to roll out a nationwide smoking ban in enclosed public places by the end of this year, according to a story by Alistair Smout for Reuters.

“With China, there’s a lot of concern over smog and air pollution,” Alastair McCaig, an analyst at IG, was quoted as saying. “The doors have been flung open with regards to reform, and with that will come a change in standards with regards to health care.

“It will increasingly become the focus, and that’s a battle that tobacco are going to have to face in the coming years.”

Defensive stocks outperform in times of economic uncertainty and the tobacco sector gained strongly in the first half of 2013, climbing 15 percent, according to Smout.

However, since then, the sector has given away its gains as investors rotate into stocks more sensitive to growing economic optimism.