Tobacco.org

Tobacco firms urged to plant trees 

Acting Chief Makoni has urged tobacco companies contracting farmers in his area to engage in tree planting activities or risk being banned from operating in the area.

He was speaking during a tree planting ceremony organised by the Mashonaland Tobacco Company at Bamba Growth Point, Chinyika Resettlement Area, last week.

The company gave the 300 farmers it contracted 8 000 gum tree seedlings to plant, as efforts to replenish destroyed forests intensified in the area.

Traditional leaders had protested against tobacco companies and growers and even threatened to ban them from the area after the wanton destruction of forests to get firewood for curing their tobacco.

Jump to full article »

Immortal Tobacco Farmer Helped Cure Polio, Flew With Astronauts  

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in a “colored” hospital ward in Baltimore in 1951. She would have gone forever unnoticed by the outside world if not for the dime-sized slice of her tumor sent to a lab for research eight months earlier.

Lacks’s cancerous tissue was divided by technicians at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore into dozens of one- millimeter squares, cultured in test tubes in a witch’s brew of chicken blood and cow fetus and labeled “HeLa,” short for Henrietta Lacks.

Taken without Lacks’s knowledge or consent, the HeLa cells changed medical history: They were the first human cells found to be “immortal,” able to reproduce indefinitely outside of the human body, writes Rebecca Skloot in her riveting book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

“Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity,” Skloot writes. “They kept growing like nothing anyone had ever seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours.” . . .

Lacks was born in Roanoke, Virginia, on Aug. 1, 1920. Motherless by age 4, she grew up picking tobacco at her grandfather’s farm in Clover, Virginia, and later moved with her husband and family to Turner Station in Baltimore County, Skloot tells us. Lacks was 31 when she died, leaving behind five children

Jump to full article »

Turkish labor unions stage one-day strike to support former state tobacco company workers  

Tens of thousands of workers from six Turkish labor unions are staging a one-day strike in support of former state tobacco company employees over their layoffs.

Workers taking part in the Thursday demonstration want the government to re-employ about 10,000 workers who lost their jobs following the privatization of the state tobacco company.

Jump to full article »

Cameroon delegation in Yunnan 

A delegation from Société Industrielle de Tabacs du Cameroun (SITABAC) led by executive president, Dr. James Onobiono, visited the HongyunHonghe Tobacco Group in China's Yunnan Province on January 28 to discuss cigarette production co-operation, according to a Tobacco China Online story.

Jump to full article »

• Fighting HIV in developing countries – with tobacco  

Professor Julian Ma, of St George's, University of London. "Also, in sub-Saharan Africa, it's very difficult for a woman to insist on condom use".

With no cure or vaccine for HIV yet available, Ma and his collaborator, Professor Rainer Fischer, are co-ordinating a team of researchers across 39 European institutes who are now focused on neutralising the virus before it can cause infection – and this is where a soupy green sludge of pulverised tobacco leaves might provide an answer. . . .

Interestingly, antibodies that neutralise the HIV virus have already been identified and can be made to order. The problem is that creating such highly virus-specific antibodies – monoclonal antibodies – is expensive. The anti-cancer drug ­Herceptin, for instance, uses monoclonal antibodies and its prohibitive cost has made it a controversial drug for prescription even in some developed countries.

Ma, moreover, says that because viruses mutate, any microbicide would ideally be a cocktail of two or three antibodies. This makes the medicine twice or three times more expensive.

Enter the tobacco plant. Plants can grow proteins – which is what antibodies are – and if they're genetically modified, they can grow specific proteins that scientists know will act on the HIV virus (though diseases such as rabies could also be targeted).

Jump to full article »

Malawi Plans Increased Surveillance to Curb Tobacco Smuggling 

Malawi, the world’s largest producer of burley tobacco, will step up surveillance at its borders to curb smuggling of as much as a third of the country’s crop every year, the industry regulator said.

The southern African nation’s police, the Malawi Revenue Authority and the Tobacco Association of Malawi are being asked to “help us arrest this problem,” Bruce Munthali, chief executive officer of the Tobacco Control Commission, said in an interview today from Lilongwe, the capital.

“We are losing a lot of revenue in the form of taxes and direct revenue from sales due to smuggling of our tobacco,” Munthali said. “It’s a very big problem considering that tobacco is our economic mainstay. Every year, between 10 percent and 30 percent of our leaf is smuggled to Zambia and Mozambique.”

Jump to full article »

Remember When: 1935 tobacco auction closes high 

BSP speculates with tobacco producers fears: agriculture minister  

The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in the face of Kornelia Ninova, is speculating with the fears of the tobacco producers. This goes beyond all bounds, said agriculture minister Miroslav Naydenov at a news conference commenting on the Thursday’s protest of the tobacco producers, FOCUS News Agency reporter informs.

According to Naydenov in the National Assembly Ninova has almost called for tobacco producers to stage a protest.

Jump to full article »

Whitfield Protests Canadian Promotion of Ban on Burley Tobacco 

U.S. Representative Ed Whitfield (KY-01) continued his efforts this week to shield Kentucky tobacco farmers from the consequences of a new Canadian initiative which would effectively result in a ban on U.S. burley tobacco. The Congressman spearheaded a letter, along with four other Kentucky Members of the House of Representatives, to the Prime Minister of Canada asking that their government stop encouraging other nations to implement similar laws which could have a devastating impact on tobacco farmers in the United States.

"A worldwide ban on burley tobacco imports would be a crippling blow to Kentucky tobacco farmers and wreak havoc in several rural economies throughout the Commonwealth," Whitfield said. "For the Canadian government to be advocating a reckless policy which endangers a critical Kentucky industry is simply unacceptable, especially considering they don't yet know the ramifications of their own new law. I join my Kentucky colleagues in calling on Health Canada to stop encouraging other nations to adopt similar policies and look for ways to revise their own law so that American tobacco growers are not unfairly hurt."

Whitfield, along with Congressman Hal Rogers (KY-05), Congressman Ben Chandler (KY-06), Congressman Geoff Davis (KY-04) and Congressman Brett Guthrie (KY-02) sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday asking that Health Canada, the Canadian health department, stop lobbying other nations to adopt a law similar to their own which has effectively resulted in a ban on American air-cured burley tobacco.

Jump to full article »

Bayer starts clinical Phase I study with personalized vaccine from tobacco plants  

The transfer into clinical development of a patient-specific vaccine represents a milestone for Bayer Innovation GmbH. Following approval of the Phase I study by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) in the United States, the vaccine is now being tested in human subjects. This is the first time that proteins obtained from tobacco plants using magnICON® technology undergo clinical testing. The patient-specific vaccines produced in the pilot plant operated by the Bayer-subsidiary Icon Genetics in Halle, Germany, are intended for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), a type of cancer affecting lymphocytes. The objective of the therapy is to activate the patient's immune system, enabling the malignant cells to be targeted and destroyed by the body's own defense system.

"This personalized vaccine is being developed with the aim of keeping patients who have responded well to chemotherapy in complete remission," explains Dr. Detlef Wollweber, head of Bayer Innovation GmbH. "In other words, it should prevent a recurrence of the tumor. The initiation of this clinical trial also demonstrates that our magnICON® technology is suitable for manufacturing proteins for potential pharmaceutical applications."

Jump to full article »

Tobacco producers postpone today’s protest (ROUNDUP) 

Tobacco producers postponed today protests. This became clear at a meeting between tobacco producers and Prime Minister Boyko Borisov last evening.

The meeting between Boyko Borisov and representatives of the tobacco producers in Bulgaria ended, short after midnight, with positive results. The tobacco producers had announced yesterday that they would start a strike, in order to keep the amount of subsidies per kilogramme of produced tobacco, which would not be possible, if the total amount of the subsidy remained BGN 116 million.

Prime Minister Borisov said, for Focus News Agency, that both sides made commitments and the meeting was successful, as there would be no strike.

Jump to full article »

World Premiere of Garvanlieva's "Tobacco Girl" in France 

Premiere of documentary film "Tobacco Girl" of Biljana Garvanlieva will be held Wednesday at the International Festival of Audiovisual Programs (FIPA) in French town Biarritz. . . .

The story focuses on a 14-year-old girl Mumine, who grows tobacco together with her parents. They are part of the Juruk community in Macedonia, Turkish people that came to Southern Europe 600 years ago, populating the country's mountainous areas.

Jump to full article »

Tobacco growers demand higher prices 

Macedonian tobacco growers are satisfied with the quality of tobacco, its assessment and purchase this year. At the meeting with the Ministry of Agriculture, they evaluated that the average purchase price of MKD 192 and state subvention of MKD 60 were satisfactory. . . .

Moreover, they will demand the purchase price to be 10 to 15 percent higher in future.

Jump to full article »

• Slippery slopes of tobacco 

Tobacco leaves, fetching high prices ranging from Rp 20,000 to Rp 100,000, have transformed Temanggung regency into a tobacco-producing center, with many local farmers — who have lived in the mountains for generations — eking a living out of this crop.

As a result, the slopes of the regency’s Mount Sindoro, Mount Sumbing and Mount Prau have gradually been deforested, with locals continuously reclaiming forestland for tobacco plantations. Temanggung Regent Hasyim Afandi has acknowledged the very rapid pace of erosion on these three slopes.

“Based on a survey conducted by the Natural Disaster Study Center of Gadjah Mada University, these slopes are losing 60 tons of earth per hectare a year.”

Jump to full article »

Engineered Tobacco Plants Grow Synthetic Solar Cells  

When it comes to energy efficiency, there’s still no substitute for millions upon millions of years of evolution. Scientists at UC Berkeley have found a way to hack common tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic and photochemical cells that can be extracted, dissolved in solution and sprayed onto a glass or plastic substrate to create solar panels. That’s the idea, anyhow.

Eons of living on earth have made plants very efficient gatherers of sunlight, so the researchers genetically programmed a virus that can infect a tobacco crop. But rather than replicating genetic copies of itself like a normal virus, this one causes the plant to manufacture artificial chromosphores, tiny structures that turn sunlight into high-powered electrons.

Jump to full article »