Category: News This Week

Online cigar vendors are undermining tobacco control policies in China, according to research published by Tobacco Control.

The researchers said they had identified 106 internet cigar vendors located in 16 cities, most of them “developed cities,” including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

Only 6.6 percent of these Internet cigar vendors featured health warnings, and only 14.2 percent featured minimum age of sale information.

The researchers concluded that “new legislation and enforcement” should be used to address these issues.

The researchers were Junling Gao, Lulu Huang Pinpin Zheng and Hua Fu of the School of Public Health, Fudan University, Shanghai; and Carla J. Berg of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

White Cloud Electronic Cigarettes has signed a research partnership agreement with the University of South Florida’s (USF) marketing department under which researchers will look at the reasons why some consumers are opting for e-cigarettes rather than tobacco cigarettes.

The research will be conducted by USF’s College of Business and will encompass both qualitative and quantitative consumer studies via focus groups, interviews and surveys of adult smokers.

The project team at USF includes professor Paul Solomon, Carol Osborne and Dr. Anand Kumar, associate professor and chair of the marketing department. The faculty team’s research interests cover areas such as brand strategies, marketing communications’ effectiveness and consumer reactions to new technology products and services.

“From a marketing researcher’s perspective, this is an interesting time in the life of a product,” said Kumar.

“The e-cigarette product category is seeing an explosive growth right now.

“It is not clear whether this growth is the result of rapid adoption by innovators and early adopters that might soon level off or whether there is more widespread adoption by smokers.

“There is a lot of interest in understanding consumer motivations underlying adoption of this product and limited research that has been carried out on this aspect of the e-cigarette marketplace.”

New research carried out in Spain has shown that genetically modified tobacco plants are viable as raw material for biofuels, according to a Basque Research story.

In her Ph.D. thesis, Ruth Sanz-Barrio, an agricultural engineer at the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre and researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology, had demonstrated for the first time the viability of using specific tobacco proteins as biotechnological tools in plants, the story said.

Specifically, she had managed to increase the amount of starch produced in the tobacco leaves by 700 percent and fermentable sugars by 500 percent.

“We believe that these genetically modified plants,” she said, “could be a good alternative to food crops for producing biofuels, and could provide an outlet for the tobacco-producing areas in our country that see their future in jeopardy owing to the discontinuing of European grants for this crop.”

The full story is at http://www.basqueresearch.com/berria_irakurri.asp?Berri_Kod=4745&hizk=I#.UlwFDShSXAQ.

Tobacco smoking among Alaska’s high school students has declined dramatically in recent years, according to an Associated Press story.

Comparing data from six years ago with that gathered from a spring survey, the number of “smoking” students was down by 40 percent.

This year, 10.6 percent of students were “smokers” compared with 17.8 percent in 2007. To be a smoker a student had to have smoked at least one cigarette during the 30 days prior to the survey.

“These are great numbers,” said the state’s chief medical officer, Ward Hurlburt, during a briefing in Anchorage. “It’s wonderful news.

“We also know that there remains much work to be done. The tobacco companies continue to aggressively target young Alaskans, and we need to remain vigilant in our fight to combat that message.”

The survey looked at nearly 1,250 students from 43 high schools that were said to have been randomly selected.

Swedish Match this week unveiled at the US NACS (National Association of Convenience Stores) in Atlanta, what is describes as smart, revolutionary new packaging for General snus.

“General Snus will soon be available in a premium brushed-metal can with a fresh foil seal,” according to a Swedish Match press note.

“The ergonomic design also features a hinged metal lid, a first for the smokeless tobacco category …”

In a much-trailed move, Filtrona Filter Products yesterday took on its new name, Essentra Filter Products (EFP).

The name change realigns the company with its parent, which in June changed its name from Filtrona PLC to Essentra PLC.

In a press note announcing the name change, EFP, which has its headquarters in Singapore, described itself as the world’s leading independent provider of special filters and scientific services to the tobacco industry.

At the same time, Essentra Packaging has become the new name for two Essentra PLC packaging companies: Payne and Contego Healthcare.

All Essentra PLC companies have now taken on the Essentra name.

The European Commission might put an end to the sale of snus on Finnish cruise ships even when they are sailing in Swedish waters, according to an Esmerk Finnish News story.

When the European Parliament voted on the commission’s proposed Tobacco Products Directive on Oct. 8, the status of snus was unchanged in that its sale remained banned throughout the EU, with the exception of Sweden.

The commission’s view is that the sale of snus is banned on ships that operate under the Finnish flag.

However, at the moment, many ships that operate under the Finnish flag sell snus when they are in Swedish waters.

Electronic cigarettes have been declared illegal in the Indian state of Punjab, according to a Daily Bhaskar story quoting the health department’s chief secretary, Vini Mahajan.

The newspaper said that Punjab was the only state to have declared such a ban, though it was not clear what the prohibition encompassed—whether the manufacture, import, sale, possession, use or use in public places.

Although the story said that e-cigarettes had been declared illegal, the health secretary was speaking at a smoke-free workshop organized by the Union of South East Asia, at which he said that 12 districts of Punjab had been declared “no smoking” districts.

Soon, it was said, the whole state would be declared smoke-free.

So it seems that electronic cigarettes, which many observers believe to be hugely less risky than are tobacco cigarettes, are currently being subjected to stricter regulations than are tobacco cigarettes.

Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) is putting pressure on the government immediately to ratify the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), according to a story in The Jakarta Post.

Speaking at the National Seminar on Tobacco Control on Wednesday, Komnas HAM Commissioner Roichatul Aswidah said that tobacco smoke was a serious threat to human rights because it caused mass deaths across the globe annually.

Komnas HAM believed the government had to provide a healthy environment for its citizens by ratifying the treaty and thereby protecting people from the health threats caused by tobacco smoke, Roichatul said.

Earlier this month, Indonesian Health Minister Nafsiah Mboi was reported in another Post story as saying that her government would strive to ensure that Indonesia ratified the FCTC.

The minister said that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had agreed in principle to ratification but wanted firstly to see the government speaking with one voice on the subject. “So I think we will get there, but not yet,” she was quoted as saying.

Data from the Demography Institute of the University of Indonesia shows that cigarette consumption in Indonesia increased from 251 billion cigarettes in 2009 to 302 billion in 2012.

The Spanish Treasury is considering taking measures that would prohibit the export sale of cigarettes that are not justified by the demand in the countries of import, according to a Gibraltar Chronicle story.

The move, revealed by Treasury Secretary of State Miguel Ferre Navarrete at a conference at the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, aims to stem the flow of export cigarettes that are then smuggled back into Spain.

Spain had low tax zones such as Gibraltar and Andorra adjacent to its borders and to where such tobacco flows had been detected, he said.

Later, the export cigarettes could be found on Spanish streets.

Ferre said Spain would apply the 2012 Seoul Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products.

That would require companies involved in the tobacco trade in Spain to account for the volume of their exports to various jurisdictions, and would open the door to fines and sanctions.