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Chronic secondhand smoke exposure significantly increases the risk for Type 2 diabetes, show results from a study of Greek and Cypriot elderly men and women.
“While active smoking is strongly related to the development of diabetes mellitus, the role of exposure to secondhand smoke in the development of diabetes mellitus is unclear,” write Demosthenes Panagiotakos (Harokopio University, Athens, Greece) and colleagues in the journal Diabetic Medicine.
The researchers recruited 1190 elderly men and women aged 65 years or above from several Greek and Cypriot islands in the Mediterranean during 2005–2007.
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NICOSIA (AFP) - The Cyprus parliament voted by a large majority on Thursday to make the Mediterranean holiday island the latest EU country to ban smoking in bars, restaurants, nightclubs and workplaces.
The bill, which tightens up existing legislation that has gone largely unenforced, was carried by 27 votes to three in the 56-seat parliament with one abstention.
The sweeping changes come into effect from January 1, 2010 so as to give establishments, and smokers, time to adjust, although amendments can be made to the law before it becomes active.
Smoking will be allowed only in outside open areas such as courtyards or street cafes, while employers will be required to provide a closed smoking area for employees dying for a puff.
Die-hard smokers in Cyprus will finally have to curb the habit when one of the last EU smoking havens imposes a January 1 ban on puffing in public places.
Lawmakers are poised to pass tough new regulations banning smoking in public places, replacing an existing law which is regularly flouted.
Come January 1, smoking will be prohibited in restaurants, bars, nightclubs and workplaces, with planned hefty fines for those caught having a puff.
Nightclub owners are not amused. "Music, alcohol, and cigarettes go well together," said Phytos Thrasivoulou, head of the Cyprus Federation of Restauranteurs.
Children in Cyprus have alarming levels of nicotine in their blood, researchers said on Monday, highlighting passive smoking as a threat to development.
The Health Ministry found traces of metabolised nicotine, known as cotinine, in the saliva of 94 percent of children from non-smoking households and 97 percent of all surveyed children.
Eighteen percent of children aged between 4 and 8 showed high levels of the substance, the researchers said, citing a study of 71 households.
"The fact that children who lived in a non-smoking environment had cotinine suggests it is in their broader environment, like relatives' homes or other areas," said Stella Michaelidou, director of the State Laboratory.
"It is a pilot survey but the results are too significant to ignore," she said.
He is not the only Dutch smoker deciding to stay home. Bars and cafes in the Netherlands are seeing revenues slump after the government introduced a smoking ban in July, shortly before the credit crisis took hold.
The double whammy is costing bars as much as 30 percent of their business, said Joris Prinssen of Royal Horeca Netherlands, a lobbying group representing 20,000 bar and restaurant owners.
Other countries, too, have been hit by the coinciding smoking bans and economic malaise.
Gerard Laloi, who heads a group that represents France's bar owners, said beer sales fell 12 percent in the first nine months of the year compared with the same period last year. France banned smoking in bars and restaurants on Jan. 1. . . .
In Israel and Cyprus smoking bans also are regularly flouted.
THE existing smoking ban law is not being enforced and what Cyprus really needs is a total ban on smoking.
These are not the conclusions of health experts or politicians, but of two Supreme Court judges who have had enough of the shortcomings of anti-smoking legislation.
The law which prescribes measures for the containment of public smoking was passed by the House of Representatives in June 2002.
"Between 2002 and 2008, there has not been an actual compliance with the anti-smoking law nor has it been effectively enforced," write Takis Eliades and Demetris Hadjihambis in an open letter.
GALLAHER faces fresh accusations of colluding with Customs to mislead parliament about alleged complicity in tobacco smuggling, according to legal papers that will be lodged in court this week.
The claim is one of three cases dogging the British firm and threatens to derail the £7.5 billion takeover bid by Japan Tobacco International, which Gallaher’s board has recommended to shareholders.
The legal action, to be filed in Cyprus, is part of a dispute between Gallaher and its former distributor in the Middle East, Tlais Enterprises Ltd (TEL), based in Limassol.
However, TEL, run by Lebanese businessman Abu Hameed Tlais, is now bringing Revenue & Customs into the conflict, claiming £250m in damages for breach of contract.
The inclusion of a government agency in the legal dispute could delay the takeover, given that behind the latest writ is an allegation that financial mismanagement by Customs was covered up.
At issue is an agreement between the three parties, which senior Customs officials authorised in December 2002 and hailed as a breakthrough in their fight to control smuggling into Britain of Gallaher’s key brands — Sovereign and Dorchester. The so-called “tripartite agreement” gave Customs the ability to monitor the activities of a major distributor for the first time.
“CYPRUS is one of the worst countries in the EU when it comes to smoking levels.”
That was the verdict of EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou, who was yesterday in Nicosia’s Eleftheria Square as part of the EU’s anti-smoking campaign, HELP - For a Life Without Tobacco.
“More worrying is the fact that smoking is still part of the culture here on the island and is considered normal,” he said.
“We must educate young people that smoking is neither cool nor clever.” . . .
“Healthcare costs caused by smoking top €100 billion per year in Europe and smoking has become the main preventable killer of our time, which kills 650,000 people in the EU every year. The HELP campaign has been very successful so far in getting the message across that smokers can get help to quit, and warning young people of the risks of passive smoking and addiction. With this carbon monoxide campaign, the HELP campaign is stepping up a gear to promote a life without tobacco.”
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If Israel makes it a priority, it "can make smoking history" by reducing the top public health problem in the country to negligible levels, said a US expert on Monday.
Prof. Gregory Connolly, a tobacco control expert at the Harvard School of Public Health in Israel to advise the Health Ministry's Healthy Israel 2020 project on preventing disease and promoting good health, was a guest at a special two-day conference of anti-smoking experts at Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, organized under the auspices of the ministry and sponsored in part by the US Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute. . . .
Connolly told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Monday that implementation of similar recommendations in the state of Massachusetts is expected to save some 120,000 lives.
He added that the Israeli government must set a date by which it would scrupulously enforce existing no-smoking laws. In Dublin, he noted, there is a hefty fine against violators, while it is a relative pittance of only NIS 310 in Israel. He called on raising the tobacco tax . . .
A special meeting in Cyprus last week of anti-tobacco experts from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Israel and others - which was sponsored by the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute - overcame political boundaries in their opposition to smoking. The participants learned that hookah (water pipe) smoking, which originated in Arab countries, has spread throughout the Western world, including Israel, and poses much more danger to health than conventional cigarettes
More than one in ten deaths in Cyprus each year were caused by smoking, local press reported on Thursday.
The result was achieved by the Cyprus International Institute for the Environment and Public Health in association with the Harvard School of Public Health after a six-month study on smoking in Cyprus.
According to the statistics published in the report, 13 percent of the deceased or 650 deaths in Cyprus every year are smoking- related, which is six times greater than the deaths in road accidents.
Meanwhile, smoking consumed the country`s nearly 8 percent of health care costs every year.
ONE of Britain's biggest tobacco firms, Gallaher, has been accused by a key distributor of "permitting" the illegal smuggling of its cigarettes.
The distributor, Ptolomeous Tlais, who sold Gallaher's products throughout the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia, claims the company set up a trading "environment" conducive to illegal activity. The Cypriot-based businessman also alleges in papers lodged at the High Court that a senior Gallaher executive encouraged him to smuggle products.
Gallaher strongly denies the claims and states Tlais is responsible for the massive smuggling of its products which has deprived the British exchequer of hundreds of millions in lost duties over the past few years.
Cyprus' Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Andreas Mavroyiannis, has signed on behalf of the government the WHO (World Health Organisation) Framework Convention of Tobacco Control at the Treaty Section of the Office of Legal Affairs of the United Nations. [This graph only]
CYPRUS Airways (CY) is thinking of enforcing even stricter smoking bans at the company's headquarters and the airline-controlled areas of the islands airports following a call by its biggest union CYNIKA on all members to smoke wherever they wished. Sources close to the airline said CY complied with the law banning smoking in public places but had allowed staff to smoke in corridors and also in offices where everyone smokes, unless someone complains.
However, following a small fire at the airline's head office in Nicosia recently, which was caused by a cigarette, the company may make the entire building non-smoking. The smoking issue has been compounded by CYNIKA's call to members on Thursday, urging them to smoke anywhere they feel like, particularly at the airport.
British American created the archive to hold millions of pages of documents produced for the anti- tobacco suit filed by the state of Minnesota in 1994. Most of the records involve health and marketing issues that were the crux of the lawsuit.
But embedded in the mountains of paper are fistfuls of memos on British American's links to cigarette smuggling — documents that weren't pertinent to the lawsuit and that the company never was asked to produce. It turned them over anyway, for reasons that remain a mystery.
The smuggling papers chronicle British American's swashbuckling march through the developing world and the role of contraband sales in its global expansion. Among the papers are memos from high-ranking executives discussing the importance of illicit sales in maintaining or building market share against like-minded competitors in such locales as Lebanon, Argentina and China.
Their disclosure rocked the industry