Category: News This Week

Extinguished cigarette butts continue to release harmful toxins, reports News Medical Life Sciences, citing a new study.

Dustin Poppendieck, a measurement scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and his team discovered that in one day, a used butt can give off the equivalent of up to 14 percent of the nicotine that an actively burning cigarette emits.

Poppendieck and his team measured eight of the chemicals typically emitted from cigarettes as well as triacetin, a plasticizer often used to make cigarette filters stiff. Most of the chemicals were emitted in the first 24 hours, but nicotine and triacetin concentrations were still at about 50 percent of the initial level five days later. Butts emitted these chemicals at higher rates when the air temperature was higher.

“The nicotine coming from a butt over seven days could be comparable to the nicotine emitted from mainstream and sidestream smoke during active smoking,” Poppendieck said.

The NIST study was performed under an interagency agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
 

Joh. Wilh. von Eicken celebrates its 250^th anniversary in 2020.

In 1770, Johann Wilhelm von Eicken founded a trading company in Germany for colonial goods. He quickly established close connections with the large trading centers in Europe. The company’s commercial activities centered on tobacco, which after a few decades led to the first tobacco factory.

Throughout the years, the company defied wars, revolutions, inflation and increasing legal restrictions. More than once the fate of the company hung in the balance, but with a combination of farsightedness, courage and luck, Von Eicken grew into a globally operating tobacco company.

Today, cigarettes, cigars, fine cut and pipe tobacco are produced in Luebeck and Dingelstaedt. Both facilities are certified in accordance with IFS Food Standard 6.1.

Von Eicken is one of the last independent German family operations manufacturing cigarettes from raw tobacco through to the finished product.

Current CEO Marc von Eicken is the eighth generation Von Eicken at the helm of the operation, which employs nearly 500 people. The company sells its brands in more than 100 countries, through its branches in France, the U.S., the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, and through long‐standing distribution partners around the world.

More than 9,000 Finnish paper mill workers, along with 6,000 employees at sawmills, plywood mills and other forestry plants, have been on strike since wage talks failed in late January, according to Reuters.

Among the companies facing shutdowns are UPM Kymmene, Metsa Board and Stora Enso—all major packaging suppliers to the tobacco industry. While labor unions demand higher wages and fewer work hours, employers argue that the Finnish labor force is already expensive compared with that in other countries.

Negotiations between the companies and employees continue. Employers warned, however, that if no agreement is reached by Feb. 10, they would start locking out workers from more than 10 production plants.

The strikes could significantly impact the first-quarter results of all forestry companies on the Helsinki stock exchange, according to an analyst quoted by Bloomberg.

The unrest in Finland’s forestry sectors follows a wave of labor conflicts in other sectors. The forestry industry is a major source of income for Finland.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) said prescribing options for nicotine-replacement therapies should be widened, cautiously recommending e-cigarettes as a potential second-line quit-smoking aid, according to the “Supporting Smoking Cessation” guide.

Nicholas Zwar, chairman of the advisory group behind the guide, said the recommendation that e-cigarettes could help people quit smoking came with many caveats. “The [therapies] that have been tested and been through therapeutic approval would be the first choice, but if you have someone who has not succeeded in quitting using those methods and they are interested in nicotine vaping, there is some evidence of benefit, and they could be considered,” he said.

Zwar said using e-cigarettes is probably safer than smoking since e-cigarettes do not have the large number of toxic combustibles and carcinogens found in cigarettes. He also said the long-term health effects of vaping were not clear, but when considered in relation to helping people stop smoking it “can be considered” as a potential aid.

Nicotine-replacement therapies are the first line of aid for those looking to quit smoking in Australia. However, currently, patients can only be prescribed one nicotine-replacement therapy at a time for a maximum of 12 weeks a year. “Rather than have patients [attempt to quit smoking] once a year, it would be much better if we were able to prescribe and patients receive subsidized treatment more than once a year,” said Harry Nespolon, RACGP president.

Philip Morris International (PMI) will commercialize KT&G’s smoke-free products outside of South Korea under the terms of a new agreement.

“To achieve PMI’s vision of a smoke-free future, we must grow the smoke-free category worldwide, which requires multiple players providing a wide array of better choices for adult smokers,” said Andre Calantzopoulos, PMI’s CEO. “While IQOS continues to be the leading product in the smoke-free category, and we plan to broaden our portfolio by launching IQOS MESH in the coming months, we believe that increased collaboration will benefit adult smokers by providing greater choice and drive accelerated adoption of smoke-free products worldwide.”

The agreement will run for an initial period of three years, allowing PMI to distribute current KT&G smoke-free products and their evolutions on an exclusive basis. It does not restrict PMI from distributing its own or third-party products.

KT&G is the leading tobacco and nicotine company in South Korea. Its smoke-free products include heat-not-burn tobacco systems (Lil Mini and Lil Plus), hybrid technologies that combine heat-not-burn tobacco and e-vapor technologies (Lil Hybrid) and e-vapor products (Lil Vapor).

PMI and KT&G will seek any necessary regulatory approvals for products that may be required on a market-by-market basis.

The agreement does not pertain to combustible products. There are no current plans to commercialize KT&G products in the U.S.