Category: News This Week

China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) is to follow the example set by the country’s central authorities and build a non-smoking environment in all government-affiliated institutions, according to a story in the People’s Daily.

The General Office of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee and the State Council, the country’s cabinet, jointly released a notice on December 29 demanding that Chinese officials take the lead in obeying smoking regulations.

The notice, which appeared on the website of the State Council, reiterated that a smoking ban was in force in certain public places. It said that officials were prohibited from smoking in public, including in schools, hospitals, sports venues, and public vehicles. Officials were banned also from offering cigarettes to others at work and from buying cigarettes with public funds.

Mao Qun’an, spokesman for the NHFPC, said all health and family planning department staff would be prohibited from smoking in no-smoking areas, and some staff members would be appointed to prevent others from smoking.

Sales of tobacco products were banned in health and family planning institutions, said Mao, as were tobacco advertisements, promotions and sponsorships.

The prices of tobacco and alcohol products were increased in the Philippines yesterday as the second phase of the country’s so-called sin-tax law came into force, according to a Philippine Daily Inquirer story.

The tax on lower-priced cigarettes was increased to P17 a pack and that on higher-priced cigarettes to P27 a pack.

The taxes on both lower- and higher-priced tobacco products are due to rise until 2017, when all tobacco products will be taxed at P30 per pack.

Republic Act 10351, generally known as the sin tax law stipulates that a portion of the revenues collected from sin taxes will be allocated to projects that will benefit tobacco farmers and workers nation-wide.

A portion of the revenues will go, also, to health care and the improvement of medical facilities nationwide.

Turkey has raised taxes on tobacco products, new passenger cars, alcoholic drinks and mobile telephones, according to a Reuters story quoting an announcement in the country’s Official Gazette on Wednesday.

Under the new arrangements, the minimum tax on a pack of cigarettes was lifted to 3.75 lira from 3.22 lira.

The brief announcement of the tax increases did not explain why they had been brought in or how much new revenue they were expected to generate.

But Reuters said the central bank was struggling to curb inflation, which was thought to have ended the year at about seven per cent, and support the lira, which lost 17 per cent of its value against the US dollar last year.

Mutual, a property company operating in Omaha, Nebraska, US, yesterday banned tobacco smoking from one of its apartment buildings, according to a story by Cindy Gonzalez for the Omaha World Herald.

The decision to prohibit tobacco smoking at the Midtown Crossing building came after a survey of residents.

Aja Anderson, the DouglasCounty’s community health educator, called the addition of the Midtown Crossing building a big step because it was in a newer development in a thriving area of town.

She said many property managers started off designating a tobacco smoke-free zone in one or two buildings; then later added more areas.

“Mutual of Omaha’s decision will likely encourage others to join efforts to provide smoke-free living,” Anderson said.

Sales of high-priced cigarettes are expected to be hardest hit by the enforcement of a ban on China’s government officials smoking in public and giving and receiving cigarettes as gifts.

According to a story by Yang Jing for the Global Times, the General Office of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee and the State Council, the country’s cabinet, jointly released a notice on Sunday demanding that Chinese officials take the lead in obeying smoking regulations.

The notice, which appeared on the website of the State Council, reiterated that a smoking ban was in force in certain public places. It said that officials were prohibited from smoking in public, including in schools, hospitals, sports venues, and public vehicles.

Officials were banned also from offering cigarettes to others at work and from buying cigarettes with public funds.

Smoking, the notice said, affected the environment, people’s health and the image of the Party and the government.
Since the end of 2012, the central government has been running a campaign aimed at stamping out extravagance and the waste of public funds.

The cigarette industry has been impacted because cigarettes are a popular gift in China, and the enforcement of the bans might explain in part why, during the first 10 months of this year, China’s cigarette inventory was 7.2 per cent higher than it was during the same period of the previous year.

Overall, the ban on cigarettes is expected to deliver a hard blow to the industry, but this will mainly affect high-priced cigarettes.

This year’s total cigarette sales are almost the same as those of 2012, but sales of high-priced cigarettes, which usually cost above Yuan500 ($82.50) a carton, dropped dramatically this year, according to the owner of a tobacco store in Beijing.

Cigarette companies in Indonesia are preparing for the implementation of new regulations that restrict tobacco advertisements and require the inclusion of graphic warnings on cigarette packs, according to a story in The Jakarta Post.

The tobacco control regulations were issued by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in December 2012 and are set to take effect in June 2014.

Under the regulations, tobacco advertisements cannot be included on the front pages of publications and are not allowed to be located next to food and beverage advertisements. And while tobacco advertisements may be shown on television; they may be aired only between 21.30 and 05.00.

Forty per cent of cigarette packs will have to be given over to text and graphic warnings about the dangers of smoking.
And cigarette manufacturers will be banned from using ‘misleading’ promotional terms, including ‘light’, ‘mild’, ‘low tar, ‘slim’, ‘special’ and ‘premium’.

Sampoerna’s regulatory affairs head, Elvira Lianita, was quoted as saying that her company had no problem in complying with the regulations.

She said the regulations comprised a step towards addressing many of the understandable public health concerns regarding the sale and marketing of tobacco in the country.

The UK’s Department of Health (DoH) is reigniting its turn-of-the-year anti-smoking campaign with a £3 million push designed to provoke ‘disgust’ among television viewers, according to a story by Lara O’Reilly in Marketing Week.

This year’s ‘smokefree’ initiative from the DoH’s executive body, Public Health England, includes the ‘new news’ that smoking can be linked to damage to the brain.

It is said to follow up on research published in the New England Journal of Medicine that apparently found smokers were twice as likely to die from a stroke than were non-smokers.

The campaign, which launched yesterday, shows how smoking ‘dirties the blood’, which then travels around the body affecting the organs. The new push follows last year’s ‘distressing’ campaign that cost £2.5 million and drew 165 complaints from viewers, though it was later cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority.

US-based Ploom has warned that counterfeit versions of its Pax vaporizers can raise safety issues, according to a ChinaCSR.com story.

Ploom’s vaporizers are smoking alternative devices that heat tobacco contained in pods to a constant temperature, vaporizing nicotine and flavors without burning the materials or producing smoke.

But Ploom says that certain counterfeit Pax products contain plastic materials that are not stable at operating temperatures.

It has advised consumers who have bought counterfeit Pax products to stop using them immediately.

Ploom says it has located manufacturers of counterfeit Pax products and initiated legal actions in China to stop the manufacture and sale of these products.

A senator in the US state of Wisconsin is sponsoring legislation that would make it clear that electronic cigarettes are not included in the state’s tobacco smoking ban, according to a WSAU report.

Glenn Grothman said the purpose of electronic cigarettes was to get people to stop using traditional cigarettes, which was something the state should be encouraging smokers to do.

While he had not heard more than a handful of complaints about businesses banning the use of electronic cigarettes, Grothman said he wanted to address the issue to keep it from becoming an ongoing problem as electronic cigarettes grew in popularity.

Grothman hopes to have a hearing held on the bill when the legislature returns in January.

Meanwhile, Melissa Horn of Health First Wisconsin believes changing the smoking ban so as to exempt electronic cigarettes is unnecessary because the current law includes no mention of the devices.

She said current interpretations of the law showed the devices were perfectly legal to use in public, though a business could move to ban them unilaterally.

Taipei’s Department of Health has designated 27 bus stops along the Xinyi Road, one of the city’s busiest, as areas where tobacco smoking is due to be banned from next month, according to a story in the Taipei Times.

The bans are said by the TaipeiCity government to be in accordance with the Tobacco Hazards Prevention Act.

They will be backed up with fines of between NT$2,000 and NT$10,000 for those who are found to have ignored them.
Department commissioner Lin Chi-hung was quoted as saying that while the law prohibited tobacco smoking in most indoor public places, outdoor places such as sidewalks and bus stops had not been listed as non-tobacco-smoking areas.

However, later in the story it was said that tobacco smoking was banned in 33 outdoor areas of Taipei and on 20 sidewalks.
The department was said to have included bus stops in the list of non-tobacco-smoking areas because it had received a growing number of complaints from passengers waiting for buses.

“We have joined with the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Transportation to promote the non-smoking movement at bus stops because we want to create a smoke-free environment in Taipei,” Lin said.