Category: News This Week

A ‘death clock’ displaying the number of people said by an anti-tobacco campaigning organization to be dying in Bangladesh of tobacco related diseases has gone up in Dhaka’s Bijoy Sharani area.

The first of its kind inBangladesh, the clock was launched by the anti-tobacco organization, Progga, with the support of the government, according to a story in The Daily Star quoting a Progga press note.

The aim of the clock is to raise awareness against tobacco consumption and to urge lawmakers to introduce stricter anti-tobacco laws.

Bangladesh’s Tobacco Control Act was passed in 2005 and was revised in 2009.

A draft for further revision of the law will be proposed in the upcoming parliamentary session.

Award for Imperial Tobacco’s training programs in Slovenia

Imperial Tobacco has received an award for the quality and level of training provided for its people inSlovenia.

The Top 10 Award recognises those companies that take the best approach to employee development and learning across their business.

The award was given by the leading Slovenian training organisation, Planet GV, and their partners, Sofos Education.

All of Imperial’s 200 employees inSloveniaare involved in both internal and external learning and development initiatives locally.

These initiatives range from relationship coaching and leadership development workshops for managers, to organizational culture workshops for every employee.

“I’m very proud that we have been recognised as being amongst the best companies in the market for training our people,” said Pia Barborič Jurjaševič, market managerSlovenia.

“I’m especially pleased because this award recognises the quality of training on offer and not just the amount of money spent by a company.”

US District Court Judge, Richard Leon, has allowed a lawsuit seeking an injunction by R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard Tobacco to proceed against the Food and Drug Administration’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC), according to a Heartland Institute report.

The lawsuit alleges a conflict of interest on the scientific panel.

FDA officials asked JudgeLeonto deny the request but the judge rebuffed their claim, noting in his ruling: “the limited number of viewpoints on these issues”, “the scientific as opposed to the political nature of those viewpoints, and the distinct responsibilities of the committee.”

At issue is the membership of the TPSAC, which was created after passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.

TPSAC has eight members, three of whom allegedly present a conflict of interest with pharmaceutical companies that could benefit from anti-smoking regulations.

Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, members of such committees may not have an interest in activities in which the committee is involved. Such interest includes stock holdings or contracts with companies that may be affected by the committee’s recommendations.

But the FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, has refused to remove the three members after repeated requests for her to do so from industry and government ethics groups.

Australia’s largest tobacco retail franchise says it does not believe that it is in breach of Victorian state tobacco laws by giving away free cigarette-pack covers, according to a story by Rachel Wells for The Age.

The Tobacco Station Group (TSG), with more than 300 stores nationally, is offering covers that feature the company’s logo and website address free of charge to customers who buy tobacco products in its outlets. The nature of the covers is reportedly such that health warnings are visible when a smoker removes a cigarette from the pack.

Under the Victorian Tobacco Act (1987) retailers are prohibited from offering customers a free gift with the purchase of any tobacco product.

The federal Department of Health and Ageing is launching an investigation to see if the products breach federal tobacco laws and has advised its state and territory counterparts to do the same.

TSG has confirmed that the covers – designed to ‘enable customers to express their identity with their cigarette packs’ – are available at all of its outlets.

“TSG are of the opinion that the cases comply with the new Australian plain packaging legislation,” a spokeswoman said.

It is not the first time the federal government has investigated a product designed to cover the graphic health warnings that now comprise the major imagery on what are described as ‘plain packs’.

In December, a company launched a range of custom stickers that wrap around cigarette packs. The Box Wrap stickers with the marketing slogan, ‘It’s your box, it’s your choice’, feature a range of images including the Australian flag and scantily-clad men and women.

In this instance, the department found the company was not in breach of federal tobacco laws.

Counterfeit cigarettes are floodingBangladesh’s market and contributing to the country’s missing its VAT collection targets, according to a story in The Financial Express.

The government had set itself the target of collecting an additional Tk27.78 billion in VAT during this financial year, and the biggest contributor was to be tobacco consumers, who were expected to hand over Tk15.16 billion.

But during the past four months, VAT collections came in Tk18.00 billion short of expectations.

The chairman of the National Board of Revenue (NBR), Ghulam Hussain, recently held a meeting with VAT officials and instructed them to focus on three major sectors – tobacco, pharmaceuticals and cement.

The officials reportedly said they had found that fake cigarettes were flooding the market.

A ban on tobacco smoking in enclosed public places in Chile will be expanded following the passage of a bill in the Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday night, according to a story by Laina Roberts for the Santiago Times.

The new law will now go to the president, Sebastian Pinera, for signature.

It will extend the country’s previous enclosed-public-places tobacco-smoking restrictions to take in nightclubs, bars, casinos, and stadiums.

And it will require tobacco companies to file reports on expenses incurred and donations made under agreements with public institutions, sports organizations, academic entities, cultural organizations and non-governmental organizations.

The government is using a four-pronged anti-tobacco strategy that comprises creating smoke-free enclosed public spaces, updating a national education plan every five years, prohibiting smoking on live television before 22.00 hours, and restricting implicit or explicit tobacco advertising.

About 85 per cent of the people polled in a recent survey said they supported the inclusion of warning images on cigarette packs inChina, according to a story by Wang Qingyun for the China Daily.

But the survey was apparently carried out byBeijing’s disease and prevention control authorities, and it was carried out last year as health authorities conducted a citywide campaign advocating warning images on cigarette packs.

Interviews carried out alongside a campaign exhibition indicated that 5,700 people – or 85 per cent of those surveyed – supported the idea of putting warning images, such as rotten teeth and damaged lungs, on cigarette packs.

Dr. Michael Cummings, a tobacco researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina’sHollingsCancerCenter, says e-cigarettes could be an effective product to help people quit smoking, but that research hasn’t proven the product’s safety or efficacy, according to a WCBD-TV2 report.

“It could absolutely be a tool, but I think we need good studies to evaluate the claims,” said Cummings, who added that current products such as nicotine patches, gums and lozenges had relatively low quit rates.

Cummings said the effectiveness of e-cigarettes was inhalation – the most efficient form of delivering a drug to the brain. It was the same reason smoking was so addictive, whether it was in relation to nicotine or other drugs.

But Cummings and some other health advocates are worried about what they see as the unknowns of e-cigarettes. Earlier tests by the FDA, he said, had found chemicals similar to those used in car washes.

And he is worried about the ‘metal tubings’, which he says ‘potentially could contain lead’. The metal could leach into the inhaled vapor and be dangerous for the smoker and bystanders, he said.

However, he said that vaping e-cigarettes was clearly less dangerous than was smoking a cigarette because you could hardly get more dangerous than smoking a cigarette.

The Australian government is issuing threats about what it sees as attempts to circumvent the ‘plain’ packaging laws that it imposed from December 1.

But it is not entirely clear who it is threatening or what laws those being threatened are alleged to have broken.

An Australian Associated Press story quoted the federal Health Minister, Tanya Plibersek, as saying that ‘tobacco companies’ that try to circumvent the law with branded tins or stickers that hide graphic warnings would face legal action.

But there seems to be no suggestion that tobacco manufacturers aren’t being fully compliant with the packaging regulations, and it is them that produce the packs.

But the story then quotes Plibersek as saying: “If ‘people’ deliberately flout these laws, then we will consider and potentially take legal action against them”.

And later in the story Plibersek is quoted as saying that the government was willing to take ‘companies’ to court to make sure they complied with packaging laws.

While the story describes how one printing company has begun to sell stickers to cover the graphic warnings that form a large part of the so-called plain packs, it was not made clear whether this is in contravention of the law that imposed plain packaging, some other law, or no law.

And anyway, while the health minister is said to have received 14 complaints, all of those complaints apparently have been about ‘retailers’; and she seems not to be too concerned about retailers. “Where we’re able to educate and change public behavior – with shopkeepers, for example – then there’s no need for legal action,” Plibersek said.

“But if we have ‘large companies’ that deliberately look for ways to circumvent plain packaging, then I’ll have no hesitation in taking legal action against them.”

The story makes the point that ‘individuals who do not comply’ could face fines of up to $220,000, while companies risk penalties of up to $1.1 million’.

China’s top legislature is starting to consider whether it should push ahead with the country’s first national tobacco control law, according to a Xinhua Newswire story quoting a report released yesterday.

It was necessary to enact laws to control the dangers of smoking, said the report adopted at the closing session of a bimonthly meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee.

But it might take some time to enact a control law. The report added that tobacco control should be included in ‘future legislation work plans after proper preparation’.

So far, according to the Xinhua story, only a few provinces and cities have enacted local legislation on public smoking bans, and no law has been adopted at the national level.

During the NPC’s plenary session in March, 90 NPC deputies submitted three bills describing a law on the prevention and control of tobacco hazards, according to a report of the Education, Science, Culture and Health Committee (ESCHC) of the NPC.

The report says, too, that 139 deputies put forward another four bills calling for new laws on tobacco smoke-free public areas.

The central government has pledged to introduce a public tobacco smoking ban in its 12th five-year plan period, which runs until 2015.