Global Forum on Nicotine Focuses on Harm Reduction

Global Forum on Nicotine (GFN) took place June 16-18 in Liverpool. Multiple panel discussions took in subjects ranging from safer nicotine product regulation, tobacco harm reduction in low-to-middle-income countries and orthodoxy and dissent in science. Speakers’ pre-recorded presentations for the panel sessions will remain available online at the conference website. Three keynotes were delivered to honor Michael Russell, a psychiatrist, research scientist and pioneer in the study of tobacco dependence and the development of treatments to help smokers quit. Russell’s observation in the British Medical Journal in 1976 that “people smoke for nicotine, but they die from the tar” remains highly influential within the field.

2021-06-21
tobaccoreporter.com

Christopher Snowdon: the WHO's War on E-Cigarettes Proves It Has No Interest in an Evidence-Based Approach to Tobacco Harm Reduction

The World Health Organisation’s decision last month to give a special award to India for banning the sale of e-cigarettes was proof that the agency has no intention of taking an ethical and evidence-based approach to tobacco harm reduction. This puts it squarely at odds with countries such as the UK and New Zealand which have successfully embraced vaping as part of their tobacco control strategy. The WHO has never pursued harm reduction policies in relation to smoking and in recent years has increasingly worked to stamp out e-cigarettes and (...)

2021-06-21
conservativehome.com

Passive Smoking and Air Pollution Associated With Arthritis Risk, Poor Response to RA Treatment

Nguyen and colleagues set out to investigate the relationship between passive smoking and the risk of developing RA in a large prospective cohort of healthy French women. These results suggest that smoking by-products - whether actively or passively inhaled - could generate autoimmunity, at least towards antigens involved in RA pathogenesis. In a poster examining another link between the lungs and inflammatory arthritis (...)

2021-06-21
news-medical.net

Media Mistruths About Vaping Addressed in Panel Discussion

A live panel discussion of vaping advocates and experts discussed a number of inaccuracies that have been recently mentioned in the media. The 2020 US Vape Store Survey has revealed that sensationalist and misleading media reports is what has caused most of the damage to the vape industry in 2020, rather than the coronavirus pandemic, as commonly assumed. “At a time when accuracy in reporting is under the national spotlight, this is a vivid illustration of the real damage that can be caused by irresponsible journalism,” said ECigIntelligence editorial director Barnaby Page. “The EVALI outbreak was shown to be caused by vaping of contaminated street cannabis products – nothing to do with the nicotine products that legitimate vape stores sell – but nevertheless these small businesses suffered heavily as a result of the linkage made in sensational reporting.”

2021-06-21
vapingpost.com

Canada Proposes Making Quitting Smoking Harder for Adults

The federal government today proposed new regulations banning flavoured vaping products that will, if enacted, diminish the effectiveness of vaping as a reduced risk product compared to cigarettes. "If the government's goal is to ensure that smokers keep smoking, then they couldn't have proposed a better set of regulations", said Allan Rewak, VITA Executive Director. "All these regulations will do is create more barriers for long time heavy smokers while doing little to nothing to address the problem the federal government claims they want to solve, youth vaping", added Rewak. Recent evidence has demonstrated that in jurisdictions such as San Francisco, which implemented a flavour ban in 2018 in an effort to restrict youth vaping, failed totally in its objectives and instead resulted in a doubling of youth smoking rates after years of steady reductions.

2021-06-21
newswire.ca

Vaping: Part of The Solution

At a recent webinar organised by The Parliament Magazine and the World’s Vapers’ Alliance, EU policymakers and tobacco harm reduction experts came to together to debate the current issues surrounding vaping. Director of the consulting firm The Counterfactual, Clive Bates, highlighted several benefits of the growing popularity of vaping. First, there are physiological differences between those who smoked and those who used alternative products. “If you measure the levels of toxicants in the blood, the saliva and the urine, you’ll find much lower levels, similar to non-smokers or people who quit.” He also pointed out how e-cigarettes ‘displaced’ smoking and were more successful in helping people quit than therapy. He said, “People who use E-cigarettes have a higher quit rate, particularly if they were frequent users.”

2021-06-21
theparliamentmagazine.eu