News dall’estero_26 giugno 2018
Daily Mail, 26/06/2018
Daily Mail – coverage of RCP report: Patients ‘should be recommended e-cigarettes as a way to quit smoking and be allowed to use them at hospitals’
Patients should be recommended e-cigarettes as a way to quit smoking and be allowed to use them at hospitals, doctors’ leaders say. They are calling for patients to be routinely offered help in kicking the habit at GP appointments, outpatient clinics and when admitted to hospital. The NHS’s failure to help smokers quit is as serious as not treating cancer patients, they added. The recommendations have been drawn up by the Royal College of Physicians which has accused the NHS of being ‘negligent’ in not doing enough to help smokers quit.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5885077/Patients-recommended-e-cigarettes.html
The Independent, 26/06/2018
The Independent – coverage of RCP report: NHS staff smokers cost health service £200m a year with cigarette breaks and sick days, report finds
Lost productivity from smoking breaks alone cost £99m with total per smoker approaching £3,000 a year. NHS staff smoking habits cost the health service more than £200m a year in cigarette breaks, sick days and treatment, a report on the £1bn a year avoidable cost of tobacco dependency has found. There are more than 73,000 smokers among the 1.2 million NHS employees in England and the lost working hours from their combined smoking breaks add up to £99m a year, the Royal College of Physicians’ tobacco advisory group has said. Smokers also had 56 per cent more sick days, amounting to £101m in NHS costs, and cost £6m in treating staff with preventable diseases caused by tobacco. In total, the RCP panel said, this amounts to £2,800 per staff smoker. Professor John Britton, the chair of the RCP tobacco advisory group, told The Independent: “The NHS must end the neglect of this huge opportunity to improve our nation’s health.”
Spectator, 25/06/2018
Opinion: Why don’t more young women vape?
Sophie Jarvis from the Adam Smith Institute comments on vaping trends. When it comes to tackling the harms of smoking we still seem to stick to an abstinence-only approach. It should be made easier for adults to switch to safer (but not risk-free) alternatives. Public Health England have to their credit highlighted the relative benefits of vaping by pointing out that it’s at least 95% safer than smoking. In other words, it would take 20 non-smokers to take up vaping to outweigh the good of one smoker switching the other way. British vaping laws aren’t that Victorian, but there’s room for improvement. While we allow vape shops and vaping in public places, e-cigarette manufacturers face stiff regulation and are prevented from talking about the relative risks of vaping compared with smoking. The EU’s Tobacco Products Directive limits tank sizes, regulates nicotine content, and restricts the ability for e-cigarette sellers to market their products effectively. We know from other countries that heavy-handed e-cigarette laws don’t help smokers: in Australia, where e-cigarettes are banned, smokers as a proportion of the population dropped by just 0.6% between 2013-2016. By contrast, the UK’s relatively liberal approach to vaping lead to smoking rates falling by 2.9%. Japan also banned e-cigarettes, but they allow heat-not-burn products which has resulted in a significant decline in cigarette sales.
https://health.spectator.co.uk/why-dont-more-young-women-vape-eu-regulations-are-partly-to-blame/
Health Day, 22/06/2018
USA: Study finds large increase in number of college campuses going smokefree
Smoking continues to fall out of favour at colleges and universities across America, a new study has found. As of November 2017, over 2,000 U.S. college campuses were smokefree or tobacco-free (no smokeless tobacco use or smoking), compared with only 774 campuses in 2012, the report found. In 2017, 84% of smokefree campuses were tobacco-free, compared with 73% of smokefree campuses in 2012, according to the study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation. “Colleges and universities are ideal places to promote healthy behaviours that can continue for a lifetime, including being tobacco-free,” Corinne Graffunder, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said in an agency news release.
Yahoo Finance, 22/06/2018
Signs that Philip Morris’s iQOS heat-not-burn product might not be a big hit
Philip Morris International’s (PMI) lacklustre first-quarter earnings report has weighed heavily on the tobacco industry, after the company experienced a dramatic drop off in sales of its next-generation heat-not-burn tobacco devices in Japan. Their concern is that the device won’t be able to offset the secular decline in traditional cigarette sales. The rollout of the iQOS heat-not-burn device marked a significant change in how Philip Morris presented itself to the public and investors. The future, Philip Morris said, was going to be smokefree, and the company took out full-page ads in newspapers calling on smokers to quit and switch to alternative products. Japan was a seminal point for iQOS, and after rolling it out nationwide, it captured 80% of the heat-not-burn market in the country. However, PMI’s earnings report indicated it has burned through all of the early adopters of the new technology and now faced the prospect of convincing older, more conservative smokers to switch, a more difficult and costly task. It has since cut the cost of iQOS devices to try and boost sales.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/maybe-philip-morris-apos-iqos-133000173.html?guccounter=1
China Daily, 25/06/2018
China: On-screen smoking scenes in Chinese media declining
The number of scenes depicting tobacco smoking in Chinese movies and TV series have declined overall in the last decade, according to the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control. However the figures for 2017 were worse than in 2016, according to the public health charity. This is the 10th consecutive year the association has surveyed Chinese movies and television shows. Twenty of the top thirty movie blockbusters had at least one smoking scene last year, down 23% from 2007. The declining trend in TV series was even more apparent; 17 of the 30 most-watched shows had smoking scenes in 2017, down by 37% from 10 years ago. Under regulations issued in 2009 and 2011 by the former State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, smoking scenes are “strictly controlled” rather than banned.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201806/25/WS5b30360da3103349141de79b.html
The Guardian, 25/06/2018
Child labour rampant in tobacco industry
Child labour in tobacco is widespread and on the increase in poorer countries, a major Guardian investigation has revealed, in spite of claims by multi billion-dollar companies that they are tackling the issue. Evidence from three continents shows how children aged 14 and under are kept out of school and employed in hard and sometimes harmful physical labour to produce the tobacco leaf that fills cigarettes sold internationally, including in the UK, US and mainland Europe. Families are trapped in generational poverty while salaries at the top of the industry run to millions of dollars a year. The companies say they monitor child labour and remove children from the fields to go to school, but experts have told the Guardian that the numbers are going up, not down, as tobacco growing increases in Africa and Asia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/25/revealed-child-labor-rampant-in-tobacco-industry
Le Figaro, 26/06/2018 (allegato)
Le Canada légalise l’usage et la vente de cannabis
Le Canada légalisera le 17 octobre prochain la consommation et la vente de marijuana. Si l’opinion publique et les milieux économiques s’en réjouissent, le corps médical et certains patrons s’inquiètent des conséquences de cette légalisation. « Le compte à rebours jusqu’à la légalisation du cannabis est enclenché », a titré en une le quotidien canadien The National Post. Au tournant des années 2000, l’ancien premier ministre libéral, Jean Chrétien, avait envisagé de légaliser la marijuana. Justin Trudeau en avait fait une promesse de campagne électorale en 2015. Après avoir obtenu l’aval du Parlement cette semaine, le premier ministre a tenu parole. À peine plus d’un an avant des élections générales, le coup est bien joué. Les Canadiens pourront acheter, consommer et cultiver jusqu’à quatre plants de cannabis chez eux, si tant est qu’ils soient âgés d’au moins 18 ans. Le Canada devient ainsi le premier pays du G7 à légaliser cette drogue et le second au monde derrière l’Uruguay. […]
