Category: People

PMI reorganizes
Philip Morris International yesterday said yesterday that it was making organizational changes intended to drive the company’s transformation toward a smoke-free future while maintaining its financial performance.
“There is no doubt that the greatest contribution PMI can make to society is to replace cigarettes with less harmful alternatives,” said CEO André Calantzopoulos. “The changes we are announcing today [September 28] reflect our desire to best equip, empower and support our organization as we transform within a rapidly evolving environment.
“They reflect the exceptional quality and depth of our senior leadership and underscore our commitment to successfully deliver solutions not only for our consumers, employees and shareholders, but also to society in general.”
Effective January 1, 2018: Calantzopoulos will continue to serve as CEO; Jacek Olczak, currently CFO, will be appointed COO, responsible for the deployment of global strategy and the delivery of results for combustible and reduced-risk products; and Martin King, currently president, Asia Region, will be appointed CFO.
PMI said also that it would in future arrange its operations in six geographic regions, rather than four, as is the case now.
The full list of the organizational changes and the biographies of those involved are available on the PMI website.
September 29, 2017
IQOS pops up in London
The launch of a third IQOS store in London, England, marks a further development in Philip Morris’ pledge to convert 100,000 UK smokers to this heated tobacco product, and to reach its goal of a smoke free future for the UK, according to a press note issued by PM Limited UK & Ireland.
Yesterday, the company opened an IQOS store in Shoreditch, London, at Boxpark, which is said to be the world’s first pop-up mall.
This follows the launch of the brand’s first UK store in Soho, London, which opened in December, and its second store, which opened in Westfield, London, earlier this month.
PM said the new store was Boxpark’s first vaping pop up, and that its opening reflected the increasing numbers of people looking for alternatives to traditional cigarettes.
‘The new East London store marks a further development in the brand’s pledge to convert 100,000 UK smokers to its heated tobacco product, IQOS, and to reach its goal of a smoke free future for the UK, where cigarettes are no longer sold,’ the company said.
‘This pledge is part of PMI’s [Philip Morris International’s] global commitment to offer smokers a range of alternative smoke free products for those that cannot completely quit (which is always the best option). Building its future on this vision, PMI has invested over £3bn into research to develop a broad portfolio of potentially reduced risk products, which includes IQOS and its unique heat not burn technology.
‘The Boxpark IQOS store, which will be open seven days a week, will offer a bespoke in-store experience for customers. In the store, adult smokers will be given guided trials by trained IQOS staff to educate them about how the heated tobacco product works and discuss how they can switch to IQOS. Customers will also have the chance to customise their IQOS device at the store’s personalisation station, which will be a unique offering for customers visiting the Boxpark store.
‘Designed by international creative agency Avantgarde, the Boxpark store is minimalistic with an all-white interior and a lightly coloured stone floor. Intelligent design details such as mirrors, hidden drawers and back lighting create space within the store for a sleek and modern finish.’
“This is a significant development in IQOS’s retail expansion in the UK and we are delighted that the Boxpark team has recognised the unique retail experience our IQOS store will bring,” said Peter Nixon, MD of Philip Morris Limited UK & Ireland.
“Our first store which launched in December of last year has seen a significant response from customers and we are thrilled to be bringing IQOS to East London as part of our growing retail expansion.”
September 29, 2017
Cigarette butts a resource
Cigarette butts can be turned into a resource for killing mosquitoes, according to a story in the Economic Times of India citing a new study by an international team of scientists.
This method of pest control was described in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
The report said: ‘A single treatment with CB [cigarette butt] extracts and silver nanostructures – synthesized using the extract – significantly reduced egg hatchability of anopheles stephensi, the mosquito species that spreads the P.falciparum malaria parasite’.
Low doses of the silver nanostructures were said also to inhibit the growth of a soil bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, the organism, Klebsiella pneumoniae, that causes pneumonia, and Salmonella typhi, that causes typhoid.
Normally, the larvae of malaria mosquitoes are eaten while in water by their predators, small crustaceans called M. aspericornis, and, according to the researchers, the predation efficiency of these crustaceans is not affected by the introduction of CB-synthesized nanoparticles.
Meanwhile, smoke toxicity experiments conducted with adult mosquitoes showed that the use of CB-based mosquito coils led to mortality rates comparable to those obtained with the use of standard coils containing the pesticide permethrin.
The research was carried about by scientists in India, Italy, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.
September 26, 2017
Stocking up in the UAE
Grocery stores and smokers in the United Arab Emirates are stockpiling cigarettes to put off the impact of a new sales tax that is due to come into effect next month and that will increase prices by 100 percent, according to a story in The Khaleej Times.
Some smokers are buying and taking away as many cartons as they can, while others are making advance payments so that grocery stores reserve cigarettes for them.
At the same time, the growing demand from customers is compelling the grocery stores to make up-front payments to cigarette distributors.
Grocery-store owners reportedly told the Khaleej Times that because they were having to pay up front, they were having to ask their regular customers to pay in advance and collect their cigarettes a few days later.
One problem is that suppliers are limiting the number of cigarettes they reserve for grocery stores.
September 25, 2017
Vaping goes mainstream
In embracing electronic cigarettes for the first time, England’s ‘Stoptober’ campaign is signaling that vaping is the key to getting people to quit smoking, according to a story by Nick Triggle for BBC Online.
Launched in 2012 and held during October annually ever since, Stoptober is a 28-day stop-smoking campaign by Public Health England (PHE) that encourages and supports smokers across England to quit their habit.
This year, for the first time, the government’s Stoptober campaign will feature vaping in its television information slots.
The decision to feature vaping was made after e-cigarettes proved to be the most popular tool for quitting during last year’s campaign.
Some 53 percent of people used them, helping push the numbers of people taking part in Stoptober since its launch to more than 1.5 million.
In welcoming the campaign development, a spokesperson for the UK Vaping Industry Association said in a written statement that PHE’s commitment to encourage smokers to switch to vaping in Stoptober was hugely significant to the nation’s health.
‘The government’s Tobacco Control Plan set out their intentions to promote vaping as a viable alternative to smoking and it is encouraging to see that this was more than just warm words,’ the spokesperson said.
‘It feels that at last the tide is beginning to turn; the UK is leading the way on vaping as an effective tool to reduce and stop smoking related disease.
‘As an industry, we have consistently called for recognition of the public health potential of vaping on the back of mounting evidence from respected organisations such as Public Health England, Cancer Research UK, the Royal College of Physicians.
‘The Scottish health authorities also seem to be following the same logic. We call on the Welsh Government to make the same commitment, which was notably absent from their recent Tobacco Control Strategy.’
Meanwhile, Triggle reported that whereas e-cigarettes were not yet officially prescribed on the National Health Service, doctors and other health professionals were being encouraged to advise smokers who wanted to use them that they were a ‘better alternative to smoking’.
Government experts behind the Stoptober campaign had been encouraged by newly released research suggesting record numbers of quit attempts were proving successful.
University College London researchers had found 20 percent of attempts were successful in the first six months of 2017, compared with an average of 16 percent during the previous 10 years.
Triggle’s full report is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41339790.
September 22, 2017
Clearing the smoke
Vaping electronic cigarettes is definitely less harmful than is smoking tobacco, health bodies in Scotland have stated for the first time, according to a bbc.co story.
NHS [National Health Service] Health Scotland said it wanted to ‘clarify’ confusion around the harms and benefits of vaping devices.
More than 20 organizations have signed up to the consensus, which was led by NHS Health Scotland.
Health chiefs said, however, that using e-cigarettes while still smoking did not provide any health benefits.
The consensus statement, published by Scotland’s national health education and promotion agency, was agreed by the Scottish government, health boards, academia and charities such as the British Lung Foundation and Cancer Research UK.
There are estimated to be about 2.9 million people in the UK who use e-cigarettes, and more than half of them have given up smoking tobacco, a recent study has suggested.
However, despite the rise in e-cigarette use since 2012, about nine million people still smoke in the UK.
The full story is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-41333537.
September 22, 2017
Smoking poleaxed
Poles, who in the 1990s smoked 100 billion cigarettes a year, now smoke only 40 billion annually, according to a story by Paweł Kononczukthe for Polskie Radio citing the World Health Organization’s Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic 2017.
In addition, the proportion of smokers within Poland’s population has dropped from 42 percent in the 1980s to 24 percent in 2015.
The results of the WHO study were presented at an event in Warsaw on Wednesday.
Talking at the event, the physician, professor Witold Zatoński, said Poland, along with other EU states, was at the forefront of introducing policies aimed at curbing tobacco consumption.
He said that the drop might have been largely attributed to a 1995 law on “the protection of health against the effects of tobacco consumption, then hailed by the WHO as the best such legal act in the world”.
The deputy health Minister Zbigniew Król was quoted as saying that his ministry wanted “cigarettes to be expensive, unappealing and hard to access”.
Meanwhile, the Eurostat statistics agency said in May that Poland remained among the countries with the highest rate of deaths from smoking-related lung cancer in the EU.
September 22, 2017
Growers left indebted
Drought and extremely high temperatures have decreased leaf tobacco yields by 30-40 percent in the Semberija and Posavina regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to a Onasa News Agency story relayed by the TMA.
About 104 tobacco farmers belonging to the AD Duvan co-operative this year grew tobacco on 304 ha in the two regions.
But because of the unhelpful weather, they are thought to have produced 350,000 kg of tobacco this year; not the 500,000 kg that had been predicted earlier in the season.
AD Duvan director Čedo Gotovčević said tobacco farmers would be left in debt due to the poor yields and low purchase prices.
But there had been an increase in black market trade, Gotovčević added, with about 60 percent of tobacco producers ‘turning to illegal flows’, where purchase prices were high.
September 21, 2017
Pakistani workers protest
Sacked former employees of Philip Morris Pakistan, Frontier Sugar Mills and Pakistan Tobacco Company on Tuesday took part in a procession and staged a protest outside the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Legislative Assembly building to demand their reinstatement, according to a story in the newspaper Dawn.
The protesters were led by, among others, the Mazdoor Kisan Party spokesman Shakeel Wahidullah Khan.
Wahidullah was quoted as saying that the employees were sacked because they had tried to set up worker unions and because they had demanded their due rights from the managements concerned.
The employees had served those organisations for 15 to 30 years. They had spent the prime of their lives in those industries and played vital roles in boosting the businesses of the owners, but they had been sacked without being told why, he added.
Meanwhile, the Mehnat Kash Labour Federation president Abrarullah said that children of the employees had been expelled from their schools and workers had been deprived of medical treatment. And the only ‘fault’ of the employees, he said, had been to try to register worker unions.
September 21, 2017
Understanding vaping
The Global Forum on Nicotine is organising a series of public dialogues in Ireland and England under the title ‘Understanding Vaping’.
The dialogues are described as being free-to-attend, short, focussed events designed to enable interactive discussion and debate.
They are due to be held on October 24, October 31 and November 2. Each will start at 14:00 and end by 17:00.
The dialogues are aimed at tackling a range of issues surrounding the increasing use of nicotine products, including electronic cigarettes, whose use is less risky than is that of traditional tobacco cigarettes and that provide a viable alternative to smoking.
They are aimed also at involving public health professionals, academics and scientists, policy makers, consumers, the owners and managers of premises, and members of the public.
The first dialogue in this series is scheduled to be held on October 24 in Dublin, Ireland. It will be hosted by the Irish Vape Vendors Association and will include:
- Gillian Golden (Irish Vape Vendors Association, Ireland);
- Professor David Sweanor (University of Ottawa, Canada);
- Dr Dominic Rowley (Health STI Clinic, Ireland); and
- Martin Dockrell (Public Health England, UK).
The second dialogue is scheduled to be held on October 31 in London, England. It will be hosted by the London Drug and Alcohol Policy Forum and will include:
- Dr Penelope Bevan CBE (director, Public Health for the City of London, UK), who will chair the session;
- Helen Redmond (Silver School of Social Work, New York University, USA); and
- Louise Ross (Leicester Stop Smoking Service, UK).
The third dialogue is scheduled to be held on November 2 in Durham, England. It will be hosted by Vapourtrails TV and will include:
- David Dorn (New Nicotine Alliance and VTTV, UK);
- Jacques le Houezec (president, #SOVAPE, France); and
- Professor Gerry Stimson (programme director of the Global Forum on Nicotine).
Information on the dialogues is at: https://gfn.net.co/dialogues/autumn2017.
September 21, 2017