'Big tobacco wants our youth's lungs': rise of smoking in Jordan. When patients quit cigarettes at the King Hussein Cancer Center’s smoking clinic they are asked to be patient with their children.
Often their offspring have been exposed to so much secondhand smoke that they have become addicted, too. “For every four cigarettes their parent has smoked, the child has smoked one,” says Firas al-Hawari, a physician who directs the clinic. More than 300,000 UK smokers may have quit owing to Covid-19 fears. More than 300,000 in the UK may have quit smoking during the coronavirus crisis as evidence mounts that the habit makes them more vulnerable to Covid-19, a survey suggests.
A further 550,000 have tried to quit, while 2.4 million have cut down, according to the joint study by YouGov and the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash). Tobacco control, a ‘major component’ of environmental protection efforts – UN health official. Cost of cigarettes must rise to reflect environmental damage from tobacco industry, WHO says. The price of a packet of cigarettes should rise to reflect the wide-ranging environmental damage caused by the tobacco industry, from deforestation to water pollution, a major report has recommended.
Backed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the study found the industry’s carbon footprint was comparable to entire countries. Tobacco farms accounted for the loss of around 5 per cent of forests in parts of Asia and Africa, it stated. The UK was among the countries singled out for criticism along with several other western nations which were condemned for “literally burning poorer countries’ resources”. Cigarette production and consumption have seen dramatic growth in recent decades with around six trillion cigarettes manufactured annually for an estimated one billion smokers.
Aside from Damaging Our Health, Smoking Also Harms the Environment. The tobacco industry’s carbon footprint is greater than that of entire countries, such as Israel or Peru.
Tobacco’s disastrous effects on human health have been clear for decades, despite industry giants trying to hide the evidence linking cigarette smoke and disease for as long as possible. Despite Big Tobacco’s machinations, countless public awareness campaigns have exposed the drug’s role in causing lung cancer and numerous other serious conditions. Tobacco smoking trends in Samoa over four decades: can continued globalization rectify that which it has wrought? Empirical survey data for Samoans aged 25–64 years demonstrates a steady decline in both sexes in the prevalence of daily tobacco smoking over 1978–2013, and in current tobacco smoking over 1991–2013.
The prevalence of daily tobacco smoking in 2013 among Samoan women (15% in the 25–64 age group) was similar to levels in Australia (12% in ≥18 years in 2013) [23] and New Zealand (14% in ≥15 years in 2014/15) [24]. Among Samoan men however, the prevalence was substantially higher (40% in the 25–64 age group) compared to Australia (15% in ≥18 years in 2013) [23] and New Zealand (16% in ≥15 years in 2014/15) [24]. In men, higher levels of education were associated with lower levels of smoking prevalence throughout the period; whilst in women, there was no significant difference until 2013, at which point current smokers had significantly more years of education than non-smokers.
Article: Cigarette smoking: An undertreated risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Tobacco Atlas 2015. Pierce Brosnan orders ‘pan masala’ brand to remove his image after prompting criticism in India. Pierce Brosnan has accused the Indian brand Pan Bahar of deceptively using his image to promote a controversial product which many in the country associate with an addictive form of tobacco.
Earlier this month, the former James Bond actor prompted criticism in the country for featuring in an advert for Pan Bahar mouth freshener. In the advert, he uses the freshener and says: “Pan Bahar, class never goes out of style”. Many have linked Pan Bahar with pan masala and gutka, a strong mixture of tobacco, crushed betel nut, clove, lime and other ingredients which can be addictive. Online learning resource: Global Tobacco Control. Can we stop America's teen vaping epidemic arriving in Britain?
At Grace’s school, it doesn’t matter if you’re the coolest girl in the class or the quietest, when you get up to go to the toilet, you take your Juul.
It doesn’t matter if you’re 11 or 16, like Grace was when she first started smoking the sleek black electronic cigarette. Depending on your gender, you’ll tuck the USB-like device into your pocket or your bra, knowingly risking suspension for a hit of mango- flavoured nicotine. Last year, Grace’s school implemented a new policy: if two kids go to the toilet at the same time, they’re automatically assumed to be Juuling. “It does impact people in school,” says Grace, now 17, who, like all the teenagers in this piece, has had her name changed to protect her identity. Big tobacco secretly bankrolling anti-NHS think tank whose bosses donate thousands to Tory leadership contenders, investigation reveals.
Tobacco firm BAT ‘costs developing countries $700m in tax’ British American Tobacco has been accused of depriving developing countries of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax by using “financial manoeuvring” to shift profits to a UK subsidiary.
The Tax Justice Network estimated that London-based BAT, the world’s largest tobacco company, would avoid paying $700m (£540m) between now and 2030 in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Guyana, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago. It said that in 2016 alone BAT managed to shift $941m, roughly 12% of its group pre-tax profit that year, from overseas companies into its British subsidiary, BAT Holdings. Councils call for powers to tackle 'lawless' shisha bars. Councils have called for licensing powers to tackle “lawless” shisha bars that violate laws on smoking and fire safety by allowing smoking indoors and serving under-18s.
The Local Government Association (LGA) has been struggling to regulate premises that persistently flout regulations, as prosecutions are slow and owners making high profits are increasingly undeterred by one-off fines of £2,500. Council leaders said part of the problem of tackling shisha bars that break the law is secrecy around the ownership of many premises, limiting the ability of councils and police to take action against them. How diplomatic missions became entangled with the tobacco industry. The British high commission in Malaysia gave tens of thousands of pounds to a local thinktank while it argued against tobacco controls already enacted in the UK.
At the same time it was funded by the British foreign office, the thinktank received substantial funding from three multinational tobacco companies. The conduct of the high commission raises questions about whether diplomats went against guidelines to “limit interactions” with the tobacco industry, following previous criticism of diplomatic support for the tobacco industry abroad.
British and American diplomatic missions funded the thinktank, the Kuala Lumpur-based Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas), while it argued against tobacco taxes and plain packaging. Revealed: the free-market groups helping the tobacco industry. Not all of the groups in the network that the Guardian analyzed are active in tobacco policy, and some have done so in isolated instances. Some thinktanks issue policy papers around climate change skepticism, private education, pharmaceutical patent protections, energy deregulation and other conservative causes. In India, the Guardian found one thinktank that made statements aligned with public health experts’ proposals for tobacco control. Atlas Network Atlas Network promotes its 475 “partner” thinktanks around the world, publicising campaigns and events on various issues, and providing some of this network with awards, grants and training. Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Taxing tobacco and the new vision for financing development.
As part of the 2016 World Bank Group-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings held this past week in Washington, D.C., a fascinating panel discussion, A New Vision for Financing Development, took place on Sunday, April 17. Moderated by Michelle Fleury, BBC's New York business correspondent, it included World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, Bill Gates, Justine Greening (UK Secretary of State for International Development), Raghuram Rajan (Governor of the Reserve Bank of India), and Seth Terkper (Minister for Finance and Economic Planning of Ghana).
UK accused of hypocrisy on overseas tobacco control. The UK government is lobbying on behalf of UK-based tobacco giants operating overseas, despite spending millions of pounds trying to curb smoking rates abroad. Freedom of information requests reveal that the Foreign Office and the Department for International Trade have been championing the interests of British American Tobacco. This is despite the government being forced to draw up new guidelines for UK embassy staff after it emerged in 2012 that the UK ambassador had been lobbying the Panama government on behalf of BAT. The disclosures reveal that in the past four years FO and DIT staff met with British American Tobacco nine times to discuss a long-running tax dispute with the Bangladesh government. Vaping by young people remains a burning issue among health experts. Sifting through contradictory evidence is common when it comes to choosing the right thing to do to improve our health, not least at new year when many of us promise to leave old habits behind and make a fresh start.
One topic that is almost guaranteed to provoke arguments is e-cigarettes. Thousands of research papers have been published about these devices over the past decade. But we do not seem to be much closer to a global consensus on their risks or benefits, and arguably the debate is becoming more entrenched. What is going on? A number of factors appear to be fuelling this, but in 2018 one more than any other seemed to be driving the debate. Theconversation. It’s hard to think back to what English pubs and clubs were like before the law about smoke-free public places came into force ten years ago.