Category: News This Week

People caught breaking no-smoking regulations in public places in Bali could find themselves on the wrong end of an IDR50 million (US$4,000) fine or a jail term of three months, according to a baldidiscovery.com story.

The story said that the Smoke-free Areas Provincial Law No.7, 2013, was now in effect in Bali.

The regulations stipulate that tobacco smoking is not allowed in public places in Bali, including places of education, work places, places of worship, recreation areas or areas frequented by children.

The prohibition applies also to public transport, medical centers and sporting venues.

Businesses and those in charge of public places affected by the new regulations are being urged to create well-ventilated smoking areas.

Japan Tobacco Inc. said today that it was redesigning its Peace Lights Box and Peace Super Lights Box products.

The company said the new design was aimed at imparting a heightened sense of luxury to two products, but that their flavor and aroma would be unchanged.

The redesigned products are due to be rolled out across Japan from the middle of next month.

At the same time, the company will roll out redesigned versions of all four products in its Hope brand of cigarettes.

In this case, the new design is being put in place so as to emphasize brand consistency, but, again, there will be no change in flavor and aroma.

Smokers in Yorkshire, England, are facing pressure to give up their habit before undergoing routine surgery, according to a story in the Yorkshire Post.

The Stop Before Your Op program is being introduced in the Vale of York in the first part of a campaign by the local NHS (National Health Service) to tackle problems caused by tobacco and alcohol use, and obesity.

Smokers will be urged to attend an NHS course to help them quit before going under the knife in routine operations, leaving them facing a minimum 12-week delay before they are referred for surgery.

Doctors’ leaders say patients will not be denied surgery if they refuse but will be asked to sign waivers saying they “accept responsibility for any additional detriment to their health including complications arising from surgery or anesthesia attributed to their smoking.”

GPs say they are monitoring outcomes from smokers referred for help to quit services so as to be able to assess the success of the venture.

They claim already that there are significant benefits to be had from giving up smoking prior to surgery, among them reducing the risk of complications and improving post-operative recovery.

They claim the measure could also lead to savings for the NHS by reducing demand for intensive care, reducing readmissions for further treatment and relieving pressure on hospital beds.

Altria, Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard are preparing a full-page mea culpa to run in the Sunday editions of the US’ ‘top’ 35 newspapers, as online notices for those papers’ websites and as prime-time television spots to run for a full year on CBS, ABC, and NBC, according to a story by Clara Ritger for the National Journal.

The tobacco companies are required also to run statements on their websites and cigarette packages.

This act of ‘self-flagellation’, as Ritger described it, stems from a 2006 federal court decision ordering the tobacco companies to correct the record on statements they made about the health effects of smoking.

On Friday, the companies’ lawyers and the Justice Department struck a deal on how they will issue the apology.

A mock-up of a notice that could publish as a full-page in The New York Times reads, ‘A Federal Court has ruled that Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Altria deliberately deceived the American public about designing cigarettes to enhance the delivery of nicotine and has ordered those companies to make this statement’.

It goes on to say that the industry ‘intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive’, and that nicotine ‘changes the brain’, making it harder for smokers to quit their habit.

The tobacco companies could appeal against the language of the notices. But first, US District Judge, Gladys Kessler, is scheduled to review the agreement about how to issue the corrective statements on January 22.

The Justice Department first brought the case against the tobacco industry in 1999, arguing that tobacco manufacturers knowingly and intentionally misinformed the public about the negative health consequences of smoking.

According to Ritger, the statements would ‘correct misinformation’ about ‘the health effects of smoking, the addictiveness of smoking and nicotine, the false advertising of low-tar and light cigarettes as less harmful than regular cigarettes, the designing of cigarettes to enhance the delivery of nicotine and the health effects of second-hand smoke’.

The government of the Australian state of New South Wales is expected to ban cigarette smoking in multi-unit housing, according to an Australian Broadcasting Corp. story.

The story was carried, too, in the Newcastle Herald newspaper, where Matthew Kelly reported that the ban would apply to “common areas” of multi-unit housing.

The ABC piece said that a study by associate professor Billie Bonevski, of the University of Newcastle, had found that cigarette smoking “placed people at increased health risk,” though the Herald story indicated that Bonevski’s study had related only to exposure to smoke.

Kelly wrote that Bonevski, of the Hunter Medical Research Institute, had drawn on data from about 161,000 participants who took part in the 2012–2013 NSW study of people 45 and older.

“More than 12,000 people, including 8,000 nonsmokers, were routinely exposed to smoke in their homes for eight hours or more a week,” said the Herald story. “More than 7,000 were exposed for at least eight hours a day.

“Multi-unit dwellers were 19 percent more likely to be exposed than those living in houses, and more women than men were likely to be exposed because they [women] tended to spend more time at home.”

Last month, Daniel Fisher reported for Forbes that a large-scale study had found no clear link between secondhand tobacco-smoke exposure and lung cancer.

Fisher cites an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that provided the results of a study of 76,000 women over more than a decade.

The study found a link between smoking and cancer, with lung cancer 13 times more common among current smokers and four times more common in former smokers than in nonsmokers.

But the study found no statistically significant relationship between lung cancer and exposure to passive smoke.

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.