October 11, 2018
Jesse Elias and his colleagues just published “Revolution or redux? Assessing IQOS through a precursor product” in Tobacco Control. They used previously secret tobacco industry documents to examine Accord, an earlier version of IQOS that Philip Morris marketed without success between 1998 at 2006. In contrast to IQOS, PM scientists and executives consistently stated that Accord reduced users’ exposure to harmful constituents but that these reductions did not render Accord safer than conventional cigarettes. (PMI’s data shows that the same thing that is true for IQOS.) Moreover, Elias and colleagues found that when comparing the aerosol chemistry test results between Accord and IQOS there was not a consistent reduction in exposure to toxicants, calling into question PMI’s current safety claims for IQOS, which are made on the basis of reduced exposure.
Here is the abstract:
October 9, 2018
Tony Yang and I just published “San Francisco Voters End the Sale of Flavored Tobacco Products Despite Strong Industry Opposition” in Annals of Internal Medicine. This paper puts the successful defense of the San Francisco Flavor Ban Ordinance in a broader policy and public health context. It concludes:
Despite challenges from tobacco companies, states and localities have clear authority to restrict the sale of flavored tobacco products to reduce tobacco use and its harms to citizens. At least 2 states and more than 100 localities have passed restrictions on the sale of flavored tobacco products, although laws differ in their applicability to specific products and store types. However, Proposition E represents a major step forward because it is the nation's first comprehensive ban on the sale of flavored tobacco, and it has already inspired others to follow.
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: