December, 2016:
One quarter of people living in the EU smoke tobacco, new statistics reveal
New statistics published on Wednesday by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, reveal one quarter of people living in the EU smoke tobacco.
http://www.euronews.com/2016/12/07/one-quarter-of-people-living-in-the-eu-smoke-tobacco-reveal-new-statistics
In addition to those who smoke themselves, one in every five are passively exposed to tobacco smoke.
The new report measured how much those aged over 15 years old smoke. The data represents people’s habits in 2014. It was compiled between 2013 and 2015 and was extracted from the European Health Interview Survey.
Its findings indicate that nearly 24 percent of people in the EU smoke, when including those who only smoke occasionally. It also shows the share of men who smoke, is significantly higher than that of women.
The report, part of the European Health Interview Survey, adds that tobacco consumption is one of the largest avoidable health risks in the EU: many forms of cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are linked to tobacco use.
How it compares
The 2014 figures, when compared with the last time the EU looked at tobacco consumption in 2010, suggests a decreasing trend in tobacco usage among EU citizens.
Six years ago, 29 percent of people living in the EU considered themselves active smokers, nearly five percentage points higher than in the EU’s current evaluation.
The report also shows a drop in the percentage of smokers in the countries which previously had the highest population of tobacco users.
In Greece, 42 percent of those aged over 15 said they smoked in 2010. That number has dropped to 32 percent.
While still in the top two countries for tobacco consumption, this drop is significant and now places Greece below Bulgaria.
Sweden remains the country with the lowest percentage of smokers, with a consistent 16 percent of the population admitting to tobacco use in both surveys.
Here is a breakdown of the 2016 report data:
Smoking EU-wide: As percentage of population
Percentage of population by country aged at least 15 years old…
Non-smoking/ Current smokers
Daily exposure to tobacco smoke indoors within EU countries
Total smoking in the EU according to gender
WTO Delays Ruling In High-Stakes Tobacco Packaging Battle
The World Trade Organization will not issue a ruling on whether Australia’s “plain packaging” tobacco law usurps foreign companies’ intellectual property rights until May, according to WTO documents circulated Tuesday, delaying a decision that was slated to arrive by the end of 2016.
http://www.law360.com/articles/869566/wto-delays-ruling-in-high-stakes-tobacco-packaging-battle
A single WTO panel is weighing cases launched by the governments of Indonesia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Honduras asserting that Australian laws that ban all distinct branding from cigarette packages in favor of graphic warnings about the danger of the products. The case has teed up a high-stakes fight over the intersection of intellectual property rights and public health safeguards.
There is no precedent for such a law being challenged in Geneva, and the panel apparently needs more time to parse through the various legal issues at play.
“The panel wishes to advise that it now expects to issue its final report to the parties not before May 2017, in light of the complexity of the legal and factual issues that arise in this dispute,” the panel said in a statement circulated to the WTO.
Australia passed its packaging law in 2011 despite the protestations of numerous multinational corporations who viewed the measure as a direct threat to their use of trademarks and other branding mechanisms to promote their business. The four countries have said the law violates the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, as well as the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
At every step of the way, Australia has claimed that it has the right to curtail businesses’ trademarks in the name of public health. For the first time in the WTO’s history, the panel will have to grapple with how the TRIPS Agreement comports with a country’s right to pursue policy objectives that it deems necessary to safeguard the public’s welfare.
The legal battles over the plain packaging law began almost as soon as it went into effect, beginning with a case filed by Philip Morris Asia Ltd. under the Hong Kong-Australia bilateral investment treaty.
In that case, the panel handed a win to Australia, albeit on jurisdictional grounds, meaning that the WTO’s decision will likely be the first ruling to address the issue on the merits. Even when the decision does come down, the case will be far from settled as all parties will be entitled to a round of appeals.
Nevertheless, the case will continue to be closely watched not only by the litigants and others in the tobacco industry, but also by those companies selling products that could e subject to similar public health rules, such as alcoholic beverages or fatty and sugary foods.
–Editing by Katherine Rautenberg.
Michael Bloomberg Pledges $360 Million To Fight Tobacco
Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New Y ork City, has declared was on tobacco use around the world. The billionaire philanthropist has donated $360 million to fight tobacco use around the world.
The funds will be distributed from 2017 through 2022 and will be used for a campaign to promote higher tobacco taxes and laws banning smoking in public in poorer nations. As mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg pushed through significant increases in that city’s tobacco taxes.
While Western nations and their cities have engaged in aggresive anti-smoking campaigns over the last forty years, banning public smoking, increasing taxes and so forth, the developing world has lagged far behind in the global efforts to curb smoking.
“Reducing tobacco use is one of our greatest opportunities to save lives and prevent suffering, because we know that strong policies really do make a difference,” Bloomberg said. “Since we began working ten years ago to pass effective tobacco measures around the world, global sales of cigarettes have declined after a century of steadily increasing. The tide is turning on tobacco, but we still have a long way to go – especially in low- and middle-income countries that are home to 75% of the world’s smokers and where tobacco companies are working harder than ever to find new customers.”
He has now donated almost $1 billion to his anti-tobacco crusade.
The Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use boasts that to date it has successfully supported 59 countries in passing laws or policies, reaching nearly 3.5 billion people and saving an estimated 30 million lives.
Bloomberg Philanthropies sates that it has aided 39 countries in passing smoke-free laws. These nations include Turkey, where a survey found that the number of smokers declined by 1.2 million from 2008 to 2012. The foundation also reports that 32 countries have passed laws requiring graphic warning labels on tobacco packages, like India, which implemented such warnings covering 85% of both sides of cigarette packages. Also, 22 nations have passed bans on tobacco advertising and sponsorship, like Brazil. Major cities like Beijing and Shanghai have also passed legislation mandating smoke-free places.
In 2003, as mayor of New Y ork, Michael Bloomberg signed the New Y ork City Smoke-Free Air Act banning smoking in bars and restaurants. By 2013, the Bloomberg Administration increased the tax on cigarettes, launched anti-smoking advertising campaigns, and distributed free nicotine patches. Statistics show that these moves led to an overall smoking decline in the city of 28%, from 21.5% in 2002 to 13.9% in 2014. There were more than 400,000 fewer smokers in 2014 than in 2002. Teen smoking fell by more than 50% from 2001 to 2013.
“Mike Bloomberg has spent over a decade leading the fight against the harms of tobacco throughout the world,” said philanthropist and anti-tobacco partner Bill Gates.
“Tobacco-caused diseases are one of the greatest health challenges facing low and middle income countries. The good news is Bloomberg Philanthropies and its partners know how to implement proven solutions. Thanks to Mike Bloomberg, millions of lives will be saved.”
E-cigs Danger: 10 Puffs Pushes Up Your Risk of Heart Disease
https://www.newsghana.com.gh/e-cigs-danger-10-puffs-pushes-up-your-risk-of-heart-disease/
Scientists at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have discovered that just ten puffs on an e-cig is enough to trigger physiological changes that, in the words of one leading expert, ‘start the heart disease ball rolling’.
This study follows others which have found that – just like ‘real’ cigarettes – e-cigs raise blood pressure and promote a hardening of the arteries.
Separate research indicates that the food additives used to flavour the vapour could be dangerous when heated and inhaled.
And another hotly disputed study, published earlier this year, even suggested that those who vape are 28 per cent less likely to quit tobacco than those who do not.
Despite all this, a number of medical organisations in the UK strongly support encouraging smokers to switch from tobacco to e-cigarettes.
Public Health England has issued a statement saying the devices are ‘around 95 per cent less harmful than smoking’. And only last week the Royal College of GPs told its 52,000 members to advise those trying to give up smoking to switch to e-cigarettes.
However, critics of this approach are unconvinced by such enthusiasm.
Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: ‘Many health organisations across the UK have significant concerns about promoting e-cigarettes to smokers.
‘We simply can’t know what their effect will be on health, if used over the long term, because they have not been around long enough.
‘To me, it would be sensible to take a precautionary approach and regulate them as much as possible.’
And Dr Filippos Filippidis, lecturer in public health at Imperial College, London, said: ‘We don’t know whether we may start to see diseases emerge in ten or 20 years’ time associated with some of the ingredients. We urgently need more research into the devices.’ His warning is particularly pertinent because it took decades for the link between tobacco and lung cancer to emerge.
It became clear only thanks to the pioneering work of statistician Sir Richard Doll in the 1950s – work that has saved millions of lives.
In the Karolinska study, published in the journal Atherosclerosis, Swedish researchers took 16 occasional smokers of cigarettes and asked them to each take ten puffs on an e-cigarette.
Within the first hour, there was a ‘rapid rise’ in levels of a type of cell indicating damage to the inner lining of blood vessels, called endothelial progenitor cells or EPCs, said the scientists. This increase, they wrote ‘was of the same magnitude as following smoking of one traditional cigarette’.
This ‘very short exposure to e-cigarette vapour… may indicate an impact on vascular integrity leading to future atherosclerosis’ – better known as hardening of the arteries.
Levels of EPCs only returned to normal 24 hours later.
Professor Joep Perk, a heart specialist and spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology, said: ‘It really surprises me that so little vapour from an e-cigarette is needed to start the heart disease ball rolling.
‘It’s worrying that one e-cigarette can trigger such a response.’
So will long-term use of e-cigs cause heart disease? That remains to be seen. But the Swedish team noted that the average user takes 230 puffs a day – raising the prospect that prolonged use could cause serious damage.
Nor is this study alone. In August, a team at the University of Athens Medical School claimed that puffing on an e-cigarette for half an hour led to similar levels of stiffness in the aorta – the main artery – as smoking a tobacco cigarette. Both activities raised blood pressure, too.
Study leader Professor Charalambos Vlachopulos said at the time: ‘E-cigarettes are less harmful [than smoking tobacco] but they are not harmless.
‘I wouldn’t recommend them as a method of giving up smoking.’
New research is coming thick and fast. Last month, an American study found teenagers who used e-cigarettes were 71 per cent more likely to suffer bronchitis.
On Friday, another study claimed just one puff contained up to 270 times the safe level of toxic chemicals called aldehydes.
But it is a study in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine – which found e-cig users were 28 per cent less likely to quit tobacco smoking than those who didn’t vape – that has perhaps caused the most dispute. This finding matters because the vast majority of e-cig users are those trying to quit tobacco.
Co-author Stanton Glantz wrote: ‘While there is no question that a puff on an e-cigarette is less dangerous than a puff on a conventional cigarette, the most dangerous thing about e-cigarettes is that they keep people smoking conventional cigarettes.’
His findings have been leapt on by e-cig sceptics, who frequently quote the headline result.
But e-cig advocates have dismissed it as unscientific and even ‘grossly misleading’.
Peter Hajek, of the Tobacco Dependency Research Unit at Queen Mary, University of London, said it looked only at current smokers who had used e-cigarettes in the past – ignoring ex-smokers who had given up tobacco thanks to the devices.
Advocates of getting smokers to swap tobacco for e-cigarettes now fear their simple message – that switching saves lives – is getting lost in a cloud of confusion.
Smoking claims the lives of 93,000 people in the UK every year – accounting for almost one in every five deaths – as it significantly increases the risk of killer diseases including cancer, heart disease, and a lung condition called chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.
Professor John Britton, director of the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at Nottingham University, said: ‘The decision to switch should be a no-brainer… There’s nothing worse you could do for your health than smoke.’
And e-cigarettes did help 18,000 people quit smoking last year, according to research by University College London and Cancer Research UK.
Scientists such as Dr Britton believe that, despite the lurking dangers of e-cigarettes, they could deliver huge benefits to the country’s overall health.
To that end, a group of 13 health bodies, led by Public Health England and including Cancer Research UK, the Royal College of Physicians and Faculty of Public Health, issued an unprecedented ‘consensus statement’ in July supporting the principle that smokers should be encouraged to switch.
They wrote: ‘We all agree that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful than smoking.
‘One in two lifelong smokers dies from their addiction.
‘All the evidence suggests that the health risks posed by e-cigarettes are relatively small by comparison, but we must continue to study the long-term effects.’
They concluded: ‘The public health opportunity is in helping smokers to quit, so we may encourage smokers to try vaping.’
Yet this position is ‘out of step’ with opinion in the US and Europe, according to Prof McKee and Dr Filippidis, where health bodies are far more cautious.
Dr Filippidis said: ‘Only time will tell who is right, but my personal opinion is that some more caution would be prudent until the evidence is more clear.
‘Very soon, major tobacco companies will enter the market with their own e-cigarettes or similar products that promise harm reduction.
‘I would feel very uncomfortable promoting products created by companies which have caused so much death and pain.
‘I don’t think we could trust them with our people’s health.’
How Edinburgh University doctor Judith Mackay took on the tobacco industry in Asia
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14945140.Meet_the_Edinburgh_pensioner_who__39_s_the_most_dangerous_woman_in_the_world_in_the_eyes_of_Big_Tobacco/
HER’s is a career involving death threats, secret information passed from shadowy ‘Deep Throat’ figures, being held at gunpoint, and caught up in a trial in which key witnesses were murdered or mysteriously disappeared.
But it might be surprising to learn that these are not the experiences of a spy or globe-trotting investigative journalist, instead they are the experiences of a down-to-earth public health expert from Edinburgh.
Dr Judith Mackay, who studied medicine at Edinburgh University and is a member of the university’s Global Health Academy, has spent years battling the tobacco industry in Asia.
Now, for the first time the Hong Kong-based campaigner has revealed the full extent of the threats she faced in her career, during which she was branded as the most dangerous woman in the world by the international tobacco industry.
She told the Sunday Herald how she was for many years a “lone voice” in working at the forefront of tobacco control, trying raise awareness of the health risks of smoking and advising governments.
“Somebody once asked me do you have to be brave to be a tobacco control advocate today and my answer is no, I don’t think you do,” she said. “But I was the lone voice in the wilderness – I was basically the only person in Asia working on tobacco control regionally.
“The tobacco industry had just assumed it would ride its Marlboro cowboy into Asia and there wouldn’t be any opposition at all.”
Mackay, who was born in Yorkshire, moved to Hong Kong in 1967 at the peak of the Chinese Cultural revolution and spent a number of years working as a hospital doctor.
However she began to feel like the work was a ‘band-aid’ in having to treat so many people who had become ill as a consequence of smoking.
She decided to devote her career to tackling the industry full-time in the mid-1980s after a cigarette company attacked her work.
She said: “It [the company] was making a lot of threatening statements about how I was unaccountable and unrepresentative, claiming the tobacco industry was full of good sensible corporate advice. It was one of the turning points in my life.”
Mackay outlined the experiences she has gone through in a blog written for the ‘Dangerous Woman Project’ , which is being run by Edinburgh University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities to collate stories of women who have been labelled as ‘threatening’.
She told how she has suffered verbal abuse over the years and in 1993, a US smokers’ rights group described her as a “psychotic human garbage, a gibbering Satan, an insane psychotic just like Hitler.”
The group also threatened to “utterly destroy” her – which was investigated by the FBI and led to her being offered 24-hour police protection by the Hong Kong government.
Mackay, who is a senior policy advisor for the World Health Organisation and director and founder of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control, also had a chilling experience when she was an expert witness in a major trial involving cigarettes being smuggled into China.
The chief witness was murdered and eleven others disappeared – and Mackay discovered that she was being followed.
She helped the Hong Kong government take action against the importation and sale of smokeless tobacco, such as snuff, after she learned a ‘Deep Throat’ figure associated with the US tobacco industry had blown the whistle on a plan to immediately launch these products in the country.
In 1990, while she was working in Mongolia and staying at a government guest house, she found herself being held at gunpoint by suspicious Mongolian palace guards after going for an evening walk. She also found out there had been a cabinet meeting held to discuss whether she was a spy sent from the west.
But Mackay said her experiences had not deterred her from the fight against tobacco.
She said: “I have said – even to my lawyer – that if I were to disappear or to be found under a bus, this is not of my own doing.
“I think if anything I got very empowered by all these things that happened – it made me more determined, rather than less determined.
“But I did take some practical steps – one of which was to send our two boys when they were teenagers back to Scotland to school.
“I just felt they were safer back in the UK to finish their schooling.”
Mackay, whose husband is from Lossiemouth, still spends three months of the summer every year in Edinburgh.
The recognition for her work includes being named as one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007. She was also awarded an honorary degree by Edinburgh University in July this year.
At the age of 73, she practises tai-chi and has no intention of giving up her work.
Mackay said while much progress has been made in tobacco control, she believes she will still be tackling the tobacco industry for years to come.
“The tobacco industry is certainly as formidable as it ever was – it has just somewhat changed its tactics in terms of what it does,” she said.
“What they now do is to issue legal challenges and trade threats to governments.”
She added: “I have often said I am going to be working until I am 100 and I think that is probably true.”
8 Million Smokers Quit After Tax Hike in Philippines
Tax hikes on cigarettes have forced my Filipinos to quit, but it now seems manufacturers may be trying to flood the market before another round of tax hikes hits.
http://www.taxationinfonews.com/2016/12/8-million-smokers-quit-after-tax-hike-in-philippines/
In a recent interview the president of the Philippine Society of General Internal Medicine Antonio Miguel Dans reportedly claimed that as many as 8 million locals have quit smoking due to the effect of tax hikes on the sale of tobacco.
The latest round of tax hikes on the sale of tobacco occurred in 2012, and were aimed specifically at reducing consumption of tobacco in the country.
In 2012 the estimated smoking rate in the country was approximately 31 percent, while it has now dropped to 23 percent, a drop equivalent to approximately 8 million people.
The supply of cigarettes in the Philippines between 2012 and 2015 fell by an estimated 25.9 percent.
However, over the course of 2015 the supply had risen by 9.1 percent, as manufacturers front-load their supplies now, in order to circumvent the hoked tax rates which will be enacted next year.
The Minister also said that the tax has been supplemented by new regulations requiring packets of cigarettes to be affixed with graphic labels showing the negative effects of smoking, a measure which has also had a positive effect on smoking cessation.
Vaping’s Long-Term Effects: Here’s what the experts say
The debate over electronic cigarettes rages on, despite the vaping industry’s best efforts to promote its value in decreasing the use of tobacco cigarettes. Proponents of e-cigs argue that the technology is safer than traditional cigarettes and can be used to quit smoking altogether. The scientific community is beginning to see things differently, however. Its consensus: vaping is a scam.
https://mic.com/articles/161221/vaping-s-long-term-effects-here-s-what-the-experts-say#.oZe252gbh
The myth of e-cigarettes as a safe alternative
“The evidence consistently shows that, while some people successfully quit smoking with e-cigarettes, most people using e-cigarettes have their chances of quitting conventional cigarettes reduced by about 30%,” Dr. Stanton Glantz, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center of Tobacco Control Research and Education, told Mic. “The most dangerous thing about e-cigarettes is that they keep people smoking cigarettes.”
Dr. Glantz conceded the possibility of e-cigs as a way to transition from tobacco cigarettes, but argued that the bulk of e-cig users are what are referred to as “dual users” — consumers who smoke both e-cigs and traditional cigarettes.
That notion is backed by a 2012 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, in which researchers found that e-cig utilization was highest among current tobacco cigarette smokers at a rate of 11.4%, compared to 3.4% of the total population surveyed, 2% of former smokers and 0.8% of those who never smoked a traditional cigarette. Furthermore, a study in scientific journal Tobacco Control found that 75% of dual use smokers do not even believe vaping will help them quit cigarettes and “reported planning to quit within the next 6 months less often than adults who smoke cigarettes exclusively.” A substantial 42.3% said they never plan to quit smoking whatsoever.
That continued use means that e-cigarettes will have long-term health effects on users, but it’s still too early to tell exactly what they will be (the first e-cigarette was invented in 2003). Dr. Glantz suggests another 5-10 years are required to conduct definitive research, but his research has led him to develop an understanding of the short-term epidemiological impact, and how it relates to potential long-term risks.
Vaping’s damaging effect on the cardiovascular system
“My current thinking is that e-cigarettes are going to cause less damage than conventional cigarettes in terms of cancer, but they’re probably just as dangerous – if not more – when it comes to heart disease and non-cancer lung disease and asthma,” Glantz said.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year — that equates to one in every four deaths. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. The spreading popularity of e-cigarettes are likely to increase those numbers.
“One of the main things about smoking that causes heart disease is the ultrafine particles that are delivered through the smoke, which trigger inflammatory processes and damage the cardiovascular system,” Glantz said. “E-cigarettes deliver as much or more ultrafine particles as the ones found in cigarettes. That’s something you can’t get rid of because of the way cigarettes work — you generate an aerosol of ultrafine particles that carry the nicotine down into your lungs where it’s absorbed. You do that by burning the tobacco.
“The way e-cigarettes work is by heating up a liquid solution — propylene, glycol, glycerol, nicotine and flavorants – and that generates the ultrafine particles that go into your lungs,” Glantz continued. “The e-cigarettes that work the best in terms of delivering nicotine generate more and smaller particles than a conventional cigarette, and the smaller these particles are, the more dangerous they are. They have immediate effects on your blood and blood vessels, which we have already been able to measure and quantify.”
“The similarities between e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes in terms of vascular effects are extremely troubling,” Glantz said, bluntly, as he concluded his explanation.
Vaping’s influence on teenage smoking
Perhaps most troubling aspect is the e-cigarette industry’s hold on adolescents. A July 2016 study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics examined prevalence rates in Southern California and concluded that “the high prevalence of combined e-cigarette or cigarette use in 2014, compared with historical Southern California smoking prevalence, suggests that e-cigarettes are not merely substituting for cigarettes and indicates that e-cigarette use is occurring in adolescents who would not otherwise have used tobacco products.”
Dr. Glantz partially attributes this phenomenon to marketing techniques utilized by the vaping industry, as well as a plethora of enticing “flavors” which attract younger users. This is highly irresponsible because, even if these teenagers aren’t converting to tobacco cigarettes, “Nicotine is still really bad for the developing brain,” according to Glantz.
Between early use among adolescents and adults’ insistence on dual use smoking, e-cigarettes are bound to have long-term effects — both physiologically and culturally. What exactly they will be cannot yet be definitively quantified, but one thing’s for sure: they won’t be good.
Do cigarette graphic warnings encourage smokers to attend a smoking cessation programme
Do cigarette graphic warnings encourage smokers to attend a smoking cessation programme: a quasi-experimental study
http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2016/12/02/tobaccocontrol-2016-053207
Abstract
Objective
This study assessed whether exposure to cigarette graphic warning labels (GWLs) increased attendance to a smoking cessation programme.
Method
From 2014 to 2016, alternating cohorts of smokers in 3 residential drug treatment programmes received either GWLs (experimental) or transparent (control) labels placed on their cigarette packs for 30 days. The primary outcome was the proportion of participants who chose to attend a smoking cessation group after the labelling period.
Results
The sample (N=601) was 72.6% male, with a mean age of 41.9 (SD=11.16) and included African-American (37%), White (29.4%) and Hispanic (19.6%) participants. While similar on most measures, controls were more likely to be married, had been in the treatment programme longer and registered higher on expired carbon monoxide (CO).
After labelling, the proportion attending at least one cessation group was 26% in the experimental condition and 18.8% among controls. In an intent-to-treat analysis adjusting for group differences at baseline, and for 2 levels of nesting, those who received GWLs were more likely than controls to attend the smoking cessation group (OR=1.58, 95% CI 1.02 to 2.44).
Conclusions
Smokers who received GWLs on their cigarette packs were more likely to attend a cessation programme. Thus, this study is one of the first to document a change in a directly observed behavioural outcome as a function of month-long exposure to cigarette pack GWLs.