Tobacco control
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Findings from studies on the association between smoking and socioeconomic status are mixed. While adolescent smoking is reduced in many countries, use of smokeless tobacco seems to increase. Associations between socioeducational status and smoking as well as use of snus (smokeless tobacco), and to what extent these associations had changed significantly from 2004 to 2007 (a period of relatively abrupt changes in tobacco use in Norway), were examined. ⋯ Adolescents' socioeducational status was associated with smoking for boys and girls, while there was no similar association with snus use. This may indicate that snus truly deviates from how smoking is distributed across social strata or that snus is at a much earlier stage in the social diffusion process.
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The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) contains no provisions covering tobacco industry investments. This creates the potential for tobacco companies to benefit from investment liberalisation by using foreign investments to avoid tobacco tariffs, increase tobacco consumption and otherwise impair the implementation of FCTC-style measures. Reducing and ultimately eliminating foreign investment activities by tobacco companies can be justified on health grounds, even though it runs counter to current investment liberalisation trends. Through the FCTC process, non-binding guidelines can be elaborated to assist parties in recognising and responding to foreign investment strategies of tobacco companies, to support efforts to exclude the tobacco sector from investment liberalisation and otherwise would improve all countries' awareness of the threat from foreign investment strategies of tobacco companies and provide them with approaches to handle the problems.
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To investigate the impact of newspaper use in a year of increased coverage of litigation against the tobacco industry on youths' beliefs about the health risks of 'light' cigarettes, and examine relations between inaccurate beliefs about 'lights', perceptions of risk and intentions to quit smoking. ⋯ Inaccurate beliefs about the risks of 'lights' were negatively related to youth smokers' perceptions of risk and intentions to quit smoking. News coverage surrounding the tobacco industry's failure to disclose these risks might help reduce these inaccurate, and potentially dangerous, beliefs.
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The burden of smoking on six causes of death in women was evaluated using various novel modelling approaches. ⋯ The risks of smoking and the benefits from quitting are greater than previously reported, when utilising repeated measures of smoking data collected during follow-up, and vary by cause of death. Focused efforts to communicate the benefits of quitting to smokers and to prevent smoking initiation among children and youths should remain top public health priorities to reduce the worldwide mortality burden caused by smoking.
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It has been reported that charcoal added to cigarette filters selectively removes many of the more volatile chemicals, but it is not clear to what extent charcoal may reduce the delivery of important less volatile chemical constituents in mainstream cigarette smoke. ⋯ The addition of sufficient charcoal to cigarette filters is known to remove many volatile compounds and can potentially reduce deliveries of certain semi-volatile compounds under some machine smoking regimens. Less volatile compounds, with a significant portion in the particulate phase, are less available for selective filtration by charcoal-containing filters than the more volatile compounds that reside predominantly in the gas phase.