South Korean tobacco manufacturer KT&G on Monday unveiled what it described as its new heat-not-burn (HNB) tobacco device, Lil Hybrid, the first HNB device that works by heating a liquid cartridge, according to a story in The Korea Herald.
“Our previous HNB tobacco devices – Lil Mini and Lil Plus – had received consumer feedback that the taste needs to be improved,” Lim Wang-seob, chief of the company’s product innovation division, was quoted as saying. “That’s why we came up with our exclusive and new platform called Lil Hybrid.”
Lil Hybrid uses both a detachable liquid cartridge and an HNB-type stick, which has the brand name Miix. The liquid cartridge and Miix are compatible only with Lil Hybrid.
Miix is available in three different tastes, Miix Presso, Miix Mix and Miix Ice, while the liquid cartridges do not contain flavorings.
KT&G said that previous HNB tobacco devices worked by directly heating a tobacco stick to about 315 Celsius, but that Lil Hybrid heated the liquid cartridge to about 160 degrees.
Meanwhile, Lim was quoted as saying that, according to safety and health-risk tests conducted by a third-party organization, the health risks of Lil Hybrid were less than those of the company’s previous models.
In July, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety published the results of tests that it claimed had found HNB tobacco products to be equally, if not more harmful than traditional cigarettes. A court case has been launched to force it to disclose its test methodologies.
The Korean government recently decided to require, from December, that HNB products carry the same graphic warning images as combustible-tobacco products.
Category: People
Hybrid product launched
Monitoring developments
The EU Commission has said it does not undertake educational awareness-raising campaigns on the toxicity of e-liquids and flavourings, and that it does not foresee its undertaking such activities.
The Commission was replying to questions posed by a Spanish member of the EU Parliament.
In a preamble to three questions, José Blanco López said the use of refillable e-cigarettes and the potential exposure to liquids from e-cigarettes that contained high concentrations of nicotine posed risks to public health.
Twenty percent of people aged between 14 and 18 had tried this ‘new system’.
‘The majority of them do not know that it contains nicotine and many others take another type of drug due to the different way that they use e-cigarettes, according to the latest data from the Spanish National Committee for Preventing Tobacco Addiction,’ he said.
‘In accordance with European regulations in this area, namely Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008, Directive 2014/40/EU and Report COM (2016) 269 final, can the Commission say:
1) ‘Is it considering the possibility of carrying out a greater number of investigations on certain aspects of e-cigarettes which apply to refillable models, such as emissions checks and studies on the safety level of the flavouring substances and their blends?
2) ‘Does it intend to raise standards for labeling?
3) ‘Does it intend to launch informative and educational awareness-raising campaigns on the toxicity of liquids and flavouring substances?’
In reply, the Commission said it had taken note of the figures from the Spanish National Committee for Preventing Tobacco Addiction presented by the MEP.
‘The Tobacco Products Directive lays down rules for tobacco and related products placed on the EU market,’ it said. ‘Article 20 of the Directive introduces a regulatory framework for electronic cigarettes with a focus on safety, quality, consumer protection and information as well as data collection.
‘The Directive does not however harmonise all aspects of electronic cigarettes or refill containers (e.g. rules on flavours and nicotine-free refill liquids are of national competence).
‘The Commission continuously monitors developments related to e-cigarettes, including emerging scientific evidence. This information will contribute to the implementation report on the Tobacco Products Directive that the Commission is required to submit in 2021, in line with Article 28(1) of the Directive. The Commission facilitates information exchanges and best practices, assessment of data and is working with member states for example in the Expert Group on Tobacco Policy, Subgroup on Electronic Cigarettes and in the context of a Joint Action on Tobacco Control.
‘The Commission does not currently undertake educational awareness-raising campaigns and does not foresee activity in this area.’Erdoğan against e-cigs
The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, known for his staunch anti-cigarette stance, has turned his ire on electronic cigarettes, according to a story in The Hurriyet Daily News.
“They have invented something bizarre called electronic cigarette,” Erdoğan said at a symposium in Istanbul on international drug policies and public health.
“They claim it does not contain any nicotine or very little of it. But soon people will become addicted to it.”
Erdoğan said cigarette companies had approached the government to make investments in Turkey.
“They are saying they will invest $500 million or $1 billion,” he was quoted as saying.
“But we offer them alternatives. We are asking if they are going to export what they produce here. Would you do that, we ask.
“But they demand at least 10 percent of their products be consumed domestically. Then their true intention becomes clear.”
Erdoğan suggested that those companies wanted to turn young people into addicts.
“We will not allow this to happen,” he said.Santa Fe supports growers
Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company (SFNTC) has donated $100,000 to the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) for the creation of the Hurricane Relief Partnership for Carolina Sustainable Farms.
SFNTC is a subsidiary of Reynolds American, which is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of British American Tobacco.
SFNTC, a member of the non-profit CFSA, said that the new hurricane relief partnership had two key purposes:- To provide access to low-cost capital and financial planning to between 30 and 50 small sustainable farms in North and South Carolina that suffered damage due to the impact of Hurricanes Florence and Michael; and
- To create an endowment fund to guarantee availability of low-cost financing for small sustainable Carolina farms in the event of future catastrophic weather events.
“The Hurricane Relief Partnership for Carolina Sustainable Farms marks the beginning of a new strategy in building the financial resilience of our region’s sustainable agriculture community,” said Roland McReynolds, CFSA’s executive director.
“The probability of disasters in future years presents a long-term threat to the survival of sustainable family farms serving the markets for local and organic agricultural products in this region.
“These farms, some of which are SFNTC’s grower partners, are not reliably served by the safety net that exists for large-scale conventional commodity production. Yet the contributions they make to their communities — enhanced soil and water quality, biodiversity, healthy food, economic growth — are vital, and when one of these farms is lost, it has long-lasting negative effects.”
According to a press note on the Reynolds American website, CFSA will work with the Natural Capital Investment Fund (NCIFund) to leverage SFNTC’s donation to create up to $250,000 in low-cost microloans for small, sustainable farms in North and South Carolina affected by the hurricanes.
‘CFSA will also partner with the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA to support its work to assist farmers in accessing state and federal disaster relief programs, and to provide financial counselling to farmers receiving NCIFund loans under the Hurricane Relief Partnership program,’ the note said.
McReynolds added that CFSA would use funds that were not expended as part of the 2018-19 NCIFund loan guarantee agreement as a guarantee pool for weather-related farm losses beyond 2019.
The association would solicit also other contributions to this endowment, with a goal of building a larger guarantee fund to support greater availability of low-cost, low-underwriting microloans for this population of small, sustainable farms in future years.Snus ban stands
As had been expected, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has upheld an EU ban on Swedish snus.
Swedish snus is banned in all EU countries except Sweden.
The ECJ’s ruling came in response to a challenge brought by Swedish Match (SM) against the validity of the snus ban under EU law. The challenge was originally brought in the UK and was referred by the High Court there to the ECJ.
In a note posted on its website on November 22, SM said that the ECJ had published its judgment ‘concerning the prohibition to sell Swedish snus to other European Union member states’. ‘The court rules that Swedish snus will continue to be excluded from the EU’s internal market,’ it said.
‘In its judgement the court states that EU legislature has broad discretion within the area at issue and that this implies that judicial review is limited. These limitations apply both to measures decided by the EU legislature and to the basic facts on which these measures have been based. Based on such limited review the court does not find that the ban on snus is manifestly inappropriate.
‘The judgment of the ECJ cannot be appealed which leaves a future removal of the ban essentially a political issue.’
The use of snus is far safer than smoking cigarettes, and snus does not come with the environmentally-damaging filters that cigarettes include. And snus has proved to be an acceptable alternative for many smokers.Vaping is not smoking
A group of cross-party MPs is today calling for the UK Parliament to act as an example for other public places by becoming vape friendly, according to a press note issued by the UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA).
Current arrangements in the parliamentary estate, which includes both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, are said not to cater adequately for the needs of vapers.
The call is being made as part of the Vaping in workplaces and public places report, which was due to be presented today at the launch of the re-named All Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping, chaired by the MP for Rugby, Mark Pawsey (pictured at the launch of a previous report.)
It comes in the wake of increasing evidence that vaping can be used for smoking cessation. Public Health England says that vaping is 95 percent less harmful than smoking and has helped three million smokers to quit or reduce their habit.
However, many vaping policies are not helpful, with some employers banning vaping in workplaces or even during working hours. Most recently, Dundee Council in Scotland threatened employees with disciplinary action if they vaped during working hours.
Key recommendations made in the report include:- Employers should have a specific workplace vaping policy that balances the needs of current vapers and smokers looking to switch to vaping with those of non-vapers.
- Public places should have specific vaping policies that are separate from smoking regulations.
- Public Health England (PHE) should expand its vaping awareness program to correct some of the public misconceptions around vaping and so-called ‘passive vaping’.
- Vapers should vape in a responsible way that respects non-vapers.
Pawsey was quoted as saying that employers had an opportunity to help the Government achieve its ambitious target of reducing the incidence of smoking to under 12 percent by 2022. “For this to happen, it is imperative that we encourage employees trying to quit through vaping, by offering flexible workplace vaping policies,” he said.
“But it makes no sense for politicians to ask UK businesses to become more vape friendly, whilst our own workplace does not practice what we preach. There are just two vaping areas in Parliament, but most MPs and staff members who vape are not even aware where these are located. Often this leads to people simply going to a smoking area to vape which is incredibly counter-productive and contrary to guidance from Public Health England. Having Parliament becoming vape friendly would send a strong message about the benefits of vaping for those people who smoke at workplaces and public places across the UK.”
Meanwhile, Sarah Jakes, chair of the New Nicotine Alliance, described the UK as a world leader in vaping regulation. But she said the potential health benefits for smokers would be lost if people were restricted from using them everywhere.
“This report sets out sensible guidelines to help workplaces and other public spaces set policies which will encourage switching to safer alternatives, whilst considering the needs of those who would prefer to avoid the vapor,” she said.
Dan Marchant, board member of the UK Vaping Industry Association, made the point that while vaping was not smoking, time and again vaping was treated in the same way as smoking in workplaces, stations, pubs and sporting arenas across the UK.
“This is usually because of a misconception that inhaling second-hand vapor is the same as passive smoking, or because vaping is viewed as an anti-social behaviour,” he said. “In fact, there is no scientific evidence of harm from second-hand vapor, and most responsible vaping happens without bystanders even noticing.”Moral challenge laid down
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH US) has said that it is time to phase cigarettes out of the US market.
In a press note issued yesterday, the day on which the US Food and Drug Administration announced crackdowns on various tobacco and nicotine-delivery products, ASH focused on the announcement by the FDA Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, MD, that he intended to begin the process of banning the sale of menthol cigarettes.
‘Menthol was left out of a cigarette-flavoring ban in 2009, and the result is that African Americans smoke menthol cigarettes at a much higher rate – and suffer the consequences – than the general population,’ the note said. ‘But it’s long past time to think about doing away with cigarettes altogether. As Stanford University’s Robert Proctor put it in his book Golden Holocaust, “the cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization”.’
ASH went on to say that the addition of menthol made the first cigarette a person smoked easier on the throat, which made inhaling easier and increased nicotine addiction.
It said that menthol brands had been heavily marketed to African Americans, resulting in nearly nine out of 10 African American smokers using menthol cigarettes.
And it said that cigarettes generally still caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the US annually, over 1/5th of all deaths.
‘As a society, we have become numb to the harm caused by cigarettes, thanks largely to a century-long tobacco-industry public relations campaign to normalize smoking,’ the note said. ‘But take a step back, and imagine a new product coming on the market tomorrow that is highly addictive and deadly when used as intended. It would be removed from the shelves immediately.
‘Ask yourself another question: at what age do I want my kids to start smoking? The answer for nearly everyone is obviously “never”. Most smokers want to quit and wish they had never started. Nearly all made the “choice” to smoke that first cigarette as children; by adulthood, they were already addicted.’
Laurent Huber, executive director of ASH, was quoted as saying that the mass marketing of cigarettes, a highly sophisticated, addictive and defective nicotine delivery device that killed over seven million people globally every year, was an abuse of corporate power and a human rights violation. “Banning menthol is a step in the right direction, but it is time to go one step further and phase cigarettes out of the market to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths,” Huber said.
ASH said the FDA was precluded from banning tobacco sales when it was given authority over tobacco products. ‘But all the states and many local jurisdictions are empowered to end the sale of cigarettes and protect the lives of their citizens,’ the note said. ‘Such a move was politically impossible when we first learned of the health harms caused by smoking – about half of adults smoked. But we’ve made progress in the past 50 years, and driven that figure down to about 14 percent.
“It’s now within reach,” Huber said. “With the stroke of a pen, communities can end the number one preventable cause of death and disease.”No moral monopoly
The official China Youth Daily (CYD) has called for a change to the monopoly tobacco system operating in China, according to a story in The China Daily.
The story reported that the China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC) had urged its local branches to try their best to fulfil the annual sales objective of 47.5 million cases of cigarettes, or 2.38 trillion cigarettes, by the end of next month.
But the CNTC’s urgings were opposed by the CYD, which reported that the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control had said it was contrary to the Healthy China 2030 plan and the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to which China was a signatory country, for a state-owned tobacco enterprise to set an annual sales objective.
The CYD said that it should be relatively easy for China to reduce tobacco use, since tobacco was under state control.
But this was not happening. The size of China’s smoking population had remained unchanged or had increased slightly in the recent past. And annual sales of cigarettes had risen fast since 2016 when they fell to 47 million cases from a historical high of 51 million cases in 2014.
China was said to have 350 million smokers, or 31 percent of the world’s total, and about 740 million ‘second-hand smokers’. Diseases related to smoking caused the deaths of 1.36 million smokers each year, and the deaths of 10,000 ‘second-hand smokers’.
The CYD said that the Healthy China 2030 plan vowed to reduce the size of the country’s smoker population, but given the ‘tobacco corporation’s deployment and growth momentum’ (its net profit in 2016 was 1.08 trillion yuan [$156 billion] or 28 times that of Alibaba), the goal of downsizing the smoking population was mission impossible unless there was a drastic change in how it operated.
‘For example, cigarette packs in China do not bear anti-smoking photos to dissuade people from smoking, and the price of cigarettes is markedly lower in China than in many other countries,’ CYD said. ‘Trying to prevent smoking in public places, even though it is banned, is often greeted with fierce reactions from smokers. And smoking-cessation treatment remains expensive in even public hospitals.
‘Unless there is a change to the monopoly tobacco system, smoking control will remain an uphill struggle.’FDA plans welcomed
The US Food and Drug Administration’s plans to restrict the availability of tobacco and nicotine-delivery products containing flavors has been generally welcomed.
The FDA yesterday outlined a new policy framework to address what it sees as the ‘central problems’: ‘youth appeal and youth access to flavored tobacco products’ [the FDA deems electronic cigarettes to be tobacco products].
It said it would be taking steps on the following product categories:- ‘Flavored ENDS products (other than tobacco, mint, and menthol flavors or non-flavored products) that are not sold in an age-restricted, in-person location;
- ‘Flavored ENDS products (other than tobacco, mint, and menthol flavors or non-flavored products) that are sold online without heightened age verification processes;
- ‘Flavored cigars;
- ‘ENDS products that are marketed to kids; and
- ‘Menthol in combustible tobacco products, including cigarettes and cigars.’
Companies and organizations have been falling over themselves to welcome the plans insofar that they target reducing the availability of flavored products to young people.
But they are split over the question of menthol combustible cigarettes, with cigarette companies generally setting out their position that there is not enough scientific evidence to support a ban on menthol cigarettes.
Meanwhile, some organizations want the FDA to go further. The president of the American Medical Association, Barbara L. McAneny, MD, said AMA policy called for the FDA to go a step further and prohibit the use of flavoring agents in tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.New approach needed
The New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) is calling for a new approach by the UK’s public health bodies toward vaping and the consumption of other safer nicotine products.
The NNA, which is a charity concerned with improving public health through a greater understanding of risk-reduced nicotine products and their uses, said in a press note issued today that warring factions in public health were contributing to the confusion and mistrust surrounding effective alternatives to smoking.
‘If the public’s health is to be properly served by state-funded organizations, accurate and impartial information is key,’ it said.
‘Misperceptions are harmful, breed intolerance, and are exacerbated by bans and restrictions on proven safer products.
‘If public health advocates wish to see further reductions in smoking, public health needs to come together and win over hearts and minds.’
The NNA’s call for a new approach toward safer nicotine products will be reiterated today by its chair, Sarah Jakes (pictured), who is speaking at the E-Cigarette Summit at the Royal Society.
The NNA is concerned that the public has been bombarded with ‘less-than-honest propaganda from ideologically-motivated sources on products which carry a reduced risk, and which have contributed to the lowest smoking prevalence rates in the UK’s history’.
“The public need to be able to trust that the information given to us by public health authorities is accurate and complete,” Jakes was due to tell the Summit.
“[T]he vast majority of the public are not scientists, so they go with what they perceive to be a trustworthy source of information. But who can you trust when the authorities and experts are so divided?”
Jakes will highlight the ‘febrile’ political debate currently taking place in the US, where, she says, truth about vaping has been abandoned in favor of moral posturing that serves no positive purpose for US smokers. She will urge campaigners to settle their ideological differences for the benefit of those they are tasked to help.
“The vast majority of vapers don’t advocate, or even identify as vapers,” she will say. “They are simply people getting on with their lives who also happen to vape. This silent majority are mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters with ordinary and extraordinary lives to lead but our humanity is often obscured from view when the label of ‘vaper’ is applied.
“As long as the apparent controversy continues, the public will trust only what they see with their own eyes, and what they see is bans, restrictions, warning labels and something that looks like smoking.
“Misperceptions are harmful in more ways than one. They breed intolerance, which supports restrictive policy, which in turn creates more misperceptions and more intolerance. Is it any wonder that many smokers don’t see the point of switching?”
The NNA makes the point that smokers and vapers are not merely numbers in a dataset, or a trend on a graph. They are ‘real people and should not be pawns in a political power game between different factions of the public health community’. A new, more sympathetic approach was required.
“We must never lose sight of the fact that behind every data point is a real person with strengths and weaknesses, desires and ambitions, and that every life is precious,” Jakes will say.
