October 7, 2018
Dharma Bhatta and I just published “Parental tobacco use and child death: analysis of data from demographic and health surveys from South and South East Asian countries” in International Journal of Epidemiology. We determined the associations between parental tobacco use and child death under the age of five in eight South and South East Asian countries (Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Timor Leste) and found that any tobacco use (including smokeless tobacco, which is widely used in that part of the world), was associated with increased child mortality This result reinforces the need to aggressively implement protections from secondhand smoke and to encourage parents not to use any form of tobacco at home.
Here is the abstract:
Background: Child mortality is a public health challenge in developing countries, and exposure to second-hand smoke and prenatal exposure to smokeless tobacco are risk factors for child death. We determined the associations between parental tobacco use and child death under the age of five in eight South and South East Asian countries.
October 5, 2018
As the FCTC Conference of the Parties and individual countires grapple with how to fit heated tobacco products, such as PMI's IQOS, into existing regulatory regiemes, Lauren Lempert and I just published " Heated tobacco product regulation under US law and the FCTC" in Tobacco Control.
The abstract sums up the legal arguments:
October 5, 2018
The report by Public Health England that concluded that e-cigs are 95% safer than conventional cigarettes continues to be widely quoted to oppose sesnibe regulation of e-cigarettes.
As I have noted before, there were many problems with the PHE report the day it was released in August 2015.
But, given that research on e-cigarettes is rapidly accumulating, the most serious criticism of the PHE report is now that it is bacdly out-of-date. It was released over 3 years ago (and written some time before that), before almost all the research supporting our current understanding of e-cigarettes was published.
For example, since PHE was published, we know that:
October 1, 2018
Wendy Max and her colleagues at UCSF just published “Modelling the impact of a new tobacco product: review of Philip Morris International’s Population Health Impact Model as applied to the IQOS heated tobacco product” in Tobacco Control. This paper uses the information published in Philip Morris International’s Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP) application that was submitted to the FDA to assess the confidence that one can have in PMI’s prediction that, on balance, IQOS would have net population benefits.
They find many biases in the construction of the model and the assumptions behind it, all of which tend to overstate benefits and understate risks, which make PMI’s economic model inappropriate for public health decision making.
Another more general contribution of the paper are extensive supplementary tables that describe all the available models and their strengths and weaknesses.
Here is the abstract:
September 30, 2018
Several people have asked me what I thought of the letter Clive Bates and three other people sent to Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director General of the World Health Organisation of September 4, 2018 complaining about WHO’s position on e-cigarettes and other tobacco industry “harm reduction products.”
The first thing that struck me is that there were only 4 signatories, compared to the 53 on a similar letter he sent to WHO back in 2014. I have no doubt that, with a little more time, Clive could have lined up some more signatures, but the list of people who are still buying his ideas is shrinking as the evidence for the dangers of these products keeps piling up: