The Chinese Association on Tobacco Control has suggested changing the emphasis on public-places smoking regulation so that it is no longer something that ‘should be controlled’ but something that ‘must be banned,’ according to a China Daily report.
The Association put forward its suggestion during a panel discussion on a draft of the Promotion Law on Basic Medical Treatment and Public Health, which is being reviewed by the legislature.
The suggested revision was not only reasonable but also urgently needed because China had not made any breakthroughs in tobacco control since it signed the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2003, the Legal Daily said.
The country’s smoking rate had remained largely unchanged at about 27 percent, and 740 million people suffered from the effects of inhaling second-hand smoke. It was estimated that at least one million people died of smoking-related diseases in China each year.
The fight against tobacco use has been an uphill battle because the state-owned industry is a reliable source of government revenue and a large job creator, which means that it can bring its influence to bear on any efforts that might affect its business.
Last month, the China National Tobacco Corporation urged its local branches to try to fulfil the annual sales objective of 47.38 million boxes of cigarettes – each box contains 50,000 cigarettes – a sales figure that has remained stable or slightly increased during recent years.
The Legal Daily said the Healthy China 2030 plan, adopted by the central authorities in 2016, had proposed reducing the smoking rate from 27 percent to 20 percent. Anti-smoking legislation was needed to realize that objective.
China would take a big step forward in tobacco control if the suggested revision could be adopted－from ‘should be controlled’ to ‘must be banned’ – and if the types of public places where issues of second-hand smoke were most serious were specified.
‘If the revision becomes law, a number of local laws and rules on public health and tobacco control will be amended,’ the Daily said. ‘The current wording of “should be controlled” would give the local lawmakers too much space to turn a blind eye to the problem, which is an important reason why tobacco use has not been put under effective control till now.
‘Hopefully, the revision can be endorsed and strictly implemented with supporting supervisory and punitive measures, which wait to be written into the law, so as to endow the law with deterrent forces to thwart smoking in public places.
‘Also, more efforts are needed to raise the public awareness of the harm smoking can inflict on people’s health, as well as the necessity of protecting young people, particularly adolescents, from tobacco use.’
Category: People
China faces dilemma
Smoking a male preserve
A joint survey by Egypt’s Ministry of Health and Population and the World Health Organization has found that 22.8 percent of Egyptians are consumers of tobacco in various forms, according to an Asharq Al-Awsat story.
Among men, the figure is 43.6 percent, while among women it is 0.5 percent.
Dr. Doaa Al-Saleh, co-ordinator of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), seemed to suggest that the figure for smoking among women was an underestimate due to the methodology of the survey. The researchers had visited people in their homes where, in the presence of a husband, father or brother, a woman was most likely to deny smoking whether she did or did not.
Saleh said that in the future researchers hoped to conduct interviews with women in places such as universities and clubs, where they were more likely to give the correct answers.Scholarships on offer
Knowledge•Action•Change (KAC), the organization behind the Global Nicotine Forum (GNF) held annually in Poland, has launched its 2nd Global Scholarship program focused on tobacco harm reduction.
The program is said to be aimed at building research capacity in the field of tobacco harm reduction; developing and promoting the evidence base; raising awareness of research and its implications for public health policy; enabling consumers to make more informed personal health choices; and improving the implementation and understanding of tobacco harm reduction.
In a note posted on its website, KAC said that recent years had seen advances in the scientific understanding of products used for tobacco harm reduction, including laboratory-based and clinical studies of their effects and safety, behavioural studies of how and why they are used in different populations and contexts, epidemiological studies into patterns of use, and the relationship between the use of these products and changes in tobacco smoking. ‘There is an increasing understanding of the range of appropriate and effective evidence-based regulation and standards for harm reduction products, and of harm reduction strategies and policies,’ the note said.
‘However, on a global basis scientific capacity for research on tobacco harm reduction and related products is not evenly distributed, and there is considerable variation in the use of evidence to establish effective and appropriate public health policies.
‘In addition, despite there being strong evidence for the effectiveness of a tobacco harm reduction approach, public understanding of the evidence base and its implications for both policy and personal health choices is limited.
‘This scholarship program aims to redress this imbalance. We expect proposals to be modest but achievable: they will be assessed for their potential significance in advancing the field.’
KAC said it wanted people to learn from GFN and to have the opportunity to implement this learning in their home countries.
‘There will be 20 scholarships for the year, with funds available to support agreed projects up to the value of $10,000.
‘The scholarships are a K•A•C initiative funded by a grant from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW).
‘The programme was independently designed by and is run by K•A•C.
‘Some projects may be included in future versions of the KAC publication The Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction.’
The 2018 report, No Fire, No Smoke: The Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction, is due to be launched in the UK at the House of Commons on December 18.Vaping's double benefit
Vaping is being promoted in Malaysia as an aid to weight loss, according to a story in The Star.
The principal investigator of the National E-cigarette Survey (NECS) 2016, associate professor Dr. Mohamad Haniki Nik Mohamed, was quoted as saying that vaping was being touted as an appetite suppressant.
Vaping devices were being promoted as inhalation weight management aids and were clearly targeted at women and young girls, he said.
The Star said that a Google search had shown that online stores were promoting electronic cigarettes with fruit, green tea, and plant extracts, purportedly containing vitamin and weight control properties.
Meanwhile, a member of the Universiti Malaya’s Nicotine Addiction Research & Collaboration Group (NARCC), Dr. Nur Amani Natasha Ahmad Tajuddin, said the amount of these “supposedly beneficial” extracts were too little to be of use.
“What’s the percentage of green tea extract in the liquid?
“How much green tea does your body need for it to have an impact?
“These liquids [presumably e-liquids] contain more harmful chemicals than anything,” she said, adding that vaping nicotine killed taste buds and suppressed appetite but that there was no proof that it was safe.
Meanwhile, the University of Cambridge behavior and health research unit director Professor Dame Theresa Marteau said some flavors and marketing strategies were aimed at those with weight issues.
“If someone’s smoking because of weight concerns, and they want to stop, they’d be better off vaping,” she said.
“If vaping is attracting them because it’s highlighting the fact that you can smoke chocolate rather than eat chocolate, that may not be a bad thing although I wouldn’t recommend it.”
According to an article in the Nicotine & Tobacco Research Journal last year, vapers were claiming that vaping helped them to control weight gain after they stopped smoking.Okay, just a puff
While vapers may suffer the occasional smoking lapse, they don’t necessarily see such a lapse as ‘game over’ for their quit attempt, and it doesn’t have to lead to a full relapse, according to a story at medicalxpress.com describing new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK.
The research findings, published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review, suggest that vaping encourages not just smoking cessation, but long-term relapse prevention.
Lead researcher, Dr. Caitlin Notley, of the UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said electronic cigarettes were the most popular aid to quitting smoking in the UK, and that her research team had wanted to discover what happened when people who had switched to vaping lapsed back into smoking.
“In the past, a brief smoking lapse would almost always lead to a full relapse, and people would usually feel like a failure for slipping up,” said Notley. “But this was before people started switching to vaping.
“The difference is that, for some vapers, the odd cigarette was thought of as being ‘allowed’. For others, an unintentional cigarette made them even more determined to maintain abstinence in future.
“Either way, it didn’t necessarily lead to a full relapse back into smoking…
“Because vaping is a more pleasurable alternative, our research found that a full relapse into smoking isn’t inevitable when people find themselves having the odd cigarette.
“There has been a lot of theorising around the process of smoking relapse after quit attempts. But all of these date back to pre-vaping times. This fresh evidence makes us question the usefulness of that understanding now that so many people are choosing to switch to vaping.
“For ex-smokers, vaping offers a pleasurable, social and psychological substitute to cigarettes – and it powerfully alters the threat of relapse. The old ‘not a puff’ advice may need revisiting.”Protecting growers
Debate on a report on Malawi’s Tobacco Industry Bill by a joint parliamentary committee has been deferred by the leader of the House, Kondwani Nankhumwa, according to a story in The Maravi Post.
The bill, which was tabled in June this year before being referred to the joint committee, seeks to consolidate the Tobacco Act and the Control of Tobacco Auction Floors Act into one law.
It also seeks to introduce regulations specifically designed to cover contract farming, whereas previously only the auction system was recognized in law.
Presenting the report to the House, committee chairperson Joseph Chidanti Malunga said the bill would regulate contract farming and fill the gap in the legislation.
He said the committee had taken into consideration the fact that contract farming would drive auction marketing to extinction.
“The joint committee was of the view that the bill should not provide for any quota,” he said. “The markets should be left open and the market dynamics should prevail and determine volumes of tobacco to be produced and sold under either system.”
The Post report said that, under the contract farming system, growers suffered a lot of deductions, many of which they become aware of only ‘when the tobacco was being sold by the buyer’.
The committee was said to have received submissions that contract farming should be eliminated because it had proved to be less profitable for growers than the auction system, even though contract tobacco was sold for a higher price than was auction tobacco.
“The committee considered the submission and formed the view that the funded contract system should be retained because not all farmers can afford to produce tobacco with their own resources,” said Malunga. “If it is abolished, growers will be forced to get loans from commercial banks who charge exorbitant interest rates.”
However, the committee has recommended additional provisions aimed at protecting growers operating under contract farming from deductions not properly spelt out and other financial burdens.Advertising under attack
The more adolescents say they have seen advertisements for electronic cigarettes, the more often they vape e-cigarettes and smoke tobacco cigarettes, according to a press note from the European Lung Association based on a study published in ERJ Open Research. The press note was published at eurekalert.org.
The study was conducted in Germany, where regulations around tobacco and e-cigarettes advertising are less restrictive than in other parts of Europe.
“The World Health Organization recommends a comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship in its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” Dr. Julia Hansen, a senior researcher at the Institute for Therapy and Health Research (IFT-Nord), Kiel, Germany, was quoted as saying. “Despite this, in Germany, tobacco and e-cigarettes can still be advertised in shops, on billboards and in cinemas after 6pm. Elsewhere, although tobacco advertising may be banned, the regulations on advertising e-cigarettes are more variable. We wanted to investigate the impact that advertising might be having on young people.”
The researchers asked 6,902 pupils from schools in six German states to fill in anonymous questionnaires. They were aged between 10 and 18 years of age, with an average age of 13. They were asked about their lifestyle, including diet, exercise, smoking and use of e-cigarettes. They were also asked about their socioeconomic status and school performance.
The pupils were presented with pictures of real e-cigarette advertisements with brand names removed and asked how often they had seen each one.
Overall 39 percent of the pupils said they had seen the advertisements. And those who said they had seen the advertisements were found to be 2.3 times more likely to say that they used e-cigarettes and 40 percent more likely to say that they smoked tobacco cigarettes [presumably, than those who said they hadn’t seen the advertisements].
The results were said to have suggested also a correlation between seeing more advertisements and using e-cigarettes and smoking tobacco cigarettes more often.
Other factors such as age, sensation-seeking tendency, the type of school the teenagers attended and having a friend who smoked were also all linked to the likelihood of using e-cigarettes and smoking.
“In this large study of adolescents we clearly see a pattern: those who say they have seen e-cigarette adverts are more likely to say they have used e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes,” said Hansen, who was a co-researcher on the study.
“This type of research cannot prove cause and effect, but it does suggest that e-cigarette advertising is reaching these vulnerable young people. At the same time, we know that the makers of e-cigarettes are offering kid-friendly flavours such as gummi bear, bubble-gum and cherry.”Has 'thinking' tanked?
A magazine distributed to tens of thousands of British schoolchildren by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) promotes tobacco tax cuts, climate change denial, tax havens, and privatising the National Health Service (NHS) – but doesn’t say where the IEA’s money comes from, according to a story by openDemocracy.net.
The IEA, a registered educational charity, is said to send copies of the magazine EA free of charge to every school teaching A-Level economics or business studies in the UK.
‘The influential “think tank” does not disclose its funding but it has received money from British American Tobacco, oil giant BP, Jersey Finance, gambling lobbyists and right-wing US foundations pushing to privatise the NHS,’ said openDemocracy. ‘While articles on many of these topics have appeared in the IEA’s schools’ magazine, it does not disclose these financial links…
‘A shadow cabinet minister has called for the Charity Commission to broaden its ongoing probe of the IEA to include the schools’ magazine.
‘Labour shadow cabinet office minister Jon Trickett said: “It is a debasement of both politics and education when an organisation, posing as a charity, pumps seemingly paid-for propaganda into our schools”.’
“In the interests of transparency and democracy, we need to know who funds these organisations and what exactly their purpose is,” said Trickett. “Because what they say, and what they actually do, too often simply doesn’t match up.”
Tamasin Cave from Spinwatch, which investigates the PR and lobbying industry, was quoted as saying: “we are now awake to the fact that the IEA is not an independent think tank”. “It is a lobby group for private interests,” Cave said. “Most are secret, but we know it is funded by oil giants, the tobacco industry and a tax haven.
“The IEA’s magazine provides a means for these people to feed their propaganda into schools, whether that’s climate change denial, or opposition to public health policies. Just as the public are exposed to it through the IEA appearing on the BBC.”
The story said that, when asked by openDemocracy how the magazine was funded, the IEA would say only that the think tank covered the costs of the 47,000 copies sent to students every year. Although the think tank’s funders are not disclosed publicly, it denies that its editorial content is driven by its donors’ interests.Smoking rate rise in Canada
Health Canada is looking for outside experts to review its tobacco control strategy – a federal program that seems to have hit a wall after years of helping to drive down smoking rates, according to a story by John Paul Tasker for CBC News.
Statistics Canada data show that 16 per cent of Canadians aged 25 and older smoked tobacco in 2017, up from 13 percent in 2016.
Tasker reported that, according to a posting on Merx, a website used by Ottawa to list outstanding government tenders, Health Canada is asking contractors to prepare a report on the ‘value for money’ of the longstanding, multi-million-dollar program that has sought to reduce the number of smokers in Canada. The review would look back at how well the Federal Tobacco Control Strategy (FTCS) performed between 2001 and 2017.
But David Hammond of the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s foremost experts on tobacco controls, said the proposed historical review should take a backseat to an urgently needed, fundamental “rethink” of the current tobacco control program.
Hammond said there had been some substantial changes in the nicotine market since the FTCS was launched, with the recent legalization of electronic cigarettes and the introduction of more sophisticated vaping devices.
The federal government, Hammond said, could go beyond the standardized tobacco-packaging regulations it was set to introduce and pursue more restrictions on where cigarettes could be sold.
And Ottawa was urged to pursue new regulatory controls over cigarettes. “Where we’ve struggled is on the product side,” said Hammond. “We’re really good at telling people not to smoke. We’re pretty good at telling them where not to smoke.
“We’re not great at actually helping them to quit.
Where we’ve really dropped the ball is in dealing with the product. We’ve done nothing to make cigarettes less harmful or addictive.”
He suggested Ottawa could do more to “incentivize people to get off smoke” by championing e-cigarettes and vaping products as safer alternatives to traditional cigarettes. “We have to get off smoke.”Winking in the dark
Philip Morris International believes that South Africa’s proposed tobacco regulations will create an impediment to its plan to phase out its cigarettes in favor of less risky alternative products, according to a story by Nick Hedley at businesslive.co.za.
PMI has said that, ultimately, it wants to replace all its cigarettes with smoke-free alternative products such as electronic cigarettes and heat not burn tobacco products.
However, the company said if the proposed Control of Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Bill went ahead in its current form, it would restrict the communication and marketing of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes and products such as IQOS.
The bill includes also provisions that would require tobacco products to be sold in standardized packaging and that would ban point-of-sale advertising and displays.
Marcelo Nico, Philip Morris’s MD for Southern Africa, was quoted as saying that the bill’s provisions could mean that consumers never got to know about new-generation products such as IQOS, which produce “90 percent less of the dangerous components” produced by traditional, combustible cigarettes.
“What we encourage government to do, and it’s in the submissions we made on the draft bill, is to separate the combustion burning of tobacco versus smokeless products like IQOS – they should be treated differently because this is part of the solution.”
The seven-million smokers in SA “should be given an alternative”, Nico told Business Day, adding that “progressive governments” in other countries had focused their regulations on harm reduction rather than blanket bans.
