Category: News This Week

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.

Imperial Tobacco employees in Taiwan volunteered to help bring in the local rice harvest with their friends and families as part of a major community project.

Imperial was one of the first businesses to join the country’s rice land adoption program in 2009.

By purchasing rice at a guaranteed price, the program enables local farmers to earn a stable income, while the crop is then donated to those in need.

The harvest day began with a guided tour of a museum, where the participants learned about rice growing and made traditional rice cakes.

Then they were divided into groups and took part in a competition to see who was the fastest and the best at reaping the harvest.

“This was a wonderful way to enhance recognition and awareness of our commitment to local agriculture,” said Blanche Cheng, head of corporate affairs in Taiwan.

Seven U.S. public health and medical organizations yesterday called for a new national commitment to end the country’s “tobacco epidemic” for good.

They say they are looking for “bold action by all levels of government” to achieve three goals:

* to reduce smoking rates, currently at about 18 percent, to less than 10 percent within 10 years;

* to protect all U.S. citizens from secondhand smoke within five years;

* and ultimately to eliminate the death and disease caused by tobacco use.

The seven groups issuing the call to action are the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Legacy.

Their call has been made ahead of the 50th anniversary of the first U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health, issued on Jan. 11, 1964.

But while the groups are celebrating “the remarkable progress of the past 50 years,” they say that the battle is far from over.

“Tobacco use is still the number one cause of preventable death in the United States,” the groups said in a press note issued through PR Newswire.

“Smoking kills more than 440,000 Americans each year, sickens millions more and costs the nation $193 billion annually in health-care expenditures and lost productivity.

“About 44 million adults still smoke, and more than 3,000 kids try their first cigarette each day.

“It is unacceptable that tobacco still kills so many Americans, lures so many children, devastates so many families and places such a huge burden on our nation’s health-care system.”

India has made progress in reducing the prevalence of daily smoking among men, according to a Times of India story quoting from a new study led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in the U.S.

The study, Smoking Prevalence and Cigarette Consumption in 187 countries, 1980–2012, found that smoking among Indian men decreased from 33.8 percent to 23 percent between 1980 and 2012.

During the same period, smoking among Indian women was almost unchanged at 3.2 percent.

The study was published on Jan. 8 by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A senior executive at the Philippines-based cigarette manufacturer Mighty Corp. has said that the tax payment the company made for last year should put to rest false accusations that it had not been paying the correct level of duties and taxes, according to a story in the Manila Bulletin.

Mighty Corp. was said to have paid excise tax of PHP8 billion for the year 2013, up from PHP300 million the previous year.

“The tax we paid for the year 2013 reflects the jump in our market share and our fair share in the increased taxes on ‘sin’ products during last year,” said Oscar Barrientos, the company’s executive vice president.

Barrientos, a retired regional trial court judge, said that despite charges made in the news media and by some members of Congress against the company for non-payment of taxes, no case had been filed in court.

He said Mighty Corp. had paid PHP300 million in 2012 when its share of the local cigarette market was just 3 percent.

However, the company’s market share had shot up since the government put into effect Republic Act 10352, otherwise known as the sin tax law.

Worldwide population growth has meant that more people smoke today than was the case in 1980, according to a story by Kerry Sheridan for Agence France Presse, quoting figures from a new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

China had nearly 100 million more smokers in 2012 than it had three decades ago, even though its smoking rate fell from 30 percent to 24 percent during that time, said the study findings published  in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study was published as part of a series of tobacco-related articles to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first U.S. surgeon general’s report on the risks of smoking.

“Since we know that half of all smokers will eventually be killed by tobacco, greater numbers of smokers will mean a massive increase in premature deaths in our lifetime,” co-author Alan Lopez, of the University of Melbourne, was quoted as saying.

The study, led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, measured data from 187 countries.

It found that the global smoking rate among men was 41 percent in 1980 but has since declined to 31 percent.

Among women, the estimated prevalence of daily tobacco smoking was 10.6 percent in 1980 but 6.2 percent by 2012.

The most rapid decrease began in the mid-1990s, but, since 2010, smoking has been rising again among men.