Tobacco.org

Passive Smoking and Tuberculosis 

Conclusions

Similar to active smoking, passive exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke in the household also predisposes to the development of TB. Increased emphasis should therefore be put on tobacco control in national TB programs.

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HENNINGFIELD: Secondhand Smoke and Infectious Disease in Adults: A Global Women's Health Concern: Comment on "Passive Smoking and Tuberculosis" ($$) 

Secondhand smoke is a major cause of disease, including lung cancer and coronary heart disease in adults and lower respiratory illness, middle ear disease, and asthma in children. Because the prevalence of smoking is much higher in men than in women, secondhand smoke disproportionately harms women. The scope of harm to women caused by secondhand smoke is both illustrated and widened by this study by Leung and coworkers. The investigators studied never-smoking married women in China, a country where 60% of men smoke compared with only 4% of women. They found that women who were exposed to secondhand smoke in the home were significantly more likely to develop tuberculosis (TB) than women who were not exposed.

The strengths of Leung and coauthors' study are that it included a large cohort of generally healthy women aged 65 to 74 years on entry into the study along with . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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LETTER: MACKAY: License sellers of tobacco ($$) 

Retailers in Hong Kong sell cigarettes to minors in the face of tobacco control laws designed to protect children ("Most stores still selling cigarettes to teens", January 25).

This is nothing new. Sting operations in Hong Kong from 1987 have shown the same thing - that retailers are flaunting the law.

Bans globally on sales to minors are not effective unless they are given real teeth.

The best way forward for Hong Kong is to license retailers to sell cigarettes. If they are then found to be selling cigarettes to those under age, they lose their cigarette licence.

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Government urged to raise tobacco duty  

The Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health, has called on the government to further raise tobacco duty.

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ALPERT: Failed tobacco tax sees hopes go up in smoke 

The 50 percent tax hike last February increased the cost of a pack of cigarettes and smokers, like most savvy consumers looking for a deal, are finding cheaper packs can be bought on the black market.

The poorest class is always the most vulnerable to fake products or drugs, and with knowledge that the tobacco hike is increasing black-market trade, is it responsible to keep the tax in place?

While some smokers may have quit since the hike, the overall effects have been negative on the whole for community health.

Recent reports show the illicit trade is growing, and strongly. The non-duty paid cigarettes have increased by 31 percent since the tax hike on tobacco, according to a study by the Tobacco Control Concern Group. . . .

But implementing such a stringent policy would tarnish Hong Kong's image, after all, the Nazi regime was the first to ban tobacco products. . . .

Should the government be raising tobacco tax when unsurprisingly it boosts black-market activity, which is difficult to control, that also endangers the youth, and results in loss of revenue for newspaper vendors. Others may accept that every planned policy or tax has its costs, but meanwhile, much greater damage to our community goes ignored.

Increasing the tobacco tax blindly and infinitely has caused unintended negative consequences that outsize the benefit the government intended.

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• Emotions keep women on cigs  

Women have more trouble quitting cigarettes because - more than men - they tend to take up smoking to relieve emotional problems, according to a leading medic.

The claim comes after a survey of women smokers by the University of Hong Kong's school of public health.

Since 2006, the school has offered gender- specific counseling under a "Smoking Cessation Service for Female Smokers."

A survey of 332 women smokers, with an average age of 35, over six months until October 31 last year found that 26.5 percent quit after going through the program. The figure was slightly higher than previous studies, in which 21.9 percent of females said they had quit smoking after non-gender-specific counseling.

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• Arrests double for trading in illicit cigarettes ($$) 

The number of people arrested over illegal cigarette activities has nearly doubled since the tobacco tax was increased by 50 per cent in February - the youngest a boy of 11 and the oldest a 95-year-old man.

Chow Chi-kwong, head of customs' revenue and general investigation bureau, said illegal traders tried to use children to smuggle cigarettes to lower the risk of being detected.

He said the 11-year-old boy was used by his mother

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Increase efforts to tighten tobacco control 

According to the data of the Chinese Ministry of Health, there are 350 million smokers on the Chinese mainland (an average of one in three individuals). The population of passive smokers is more than 540 million. What is worrying is that the number of young smokers has reached 200 million.

One million people die from tobacco-related diseases every year on the mainland, far more than deaths from AIDS, suicide and traffic accidents combined, accounting for the highest mortality worldwide.

It is alarming to find that the average age of smokers is getting younger. On the other hand, the proportion of smokers who intend to quit remains relatively low. Though tobacco advertisements are banned, disguised form of tobacco advertisements exists everywhere, and there is still a long way to go in tobacco control.

As the impact on national health is great, the Chinese government pays great attention to tobacco control efforts and has participated in the formulation of the World Health Organization "Framework Convention on Tobacco Control". . . .

We need a systematic approach in tobacco control. Tobacco-related laws must be drawn up as soon as possible. The lack of a specific anti-smoking law is one of the reasons why tobacco control work has made little progress. We should also have operational mechanisms and excellent law enforcement teams (Hong Kong has set up a Tobacco Control Office in order to enforce the smoking ban in public areas). As the anti-smoking law itself needs an operational arm for implementation, the State Council should seriously consider setting up a National Tobacco Control Office to do the job.

In addition, "anti-smoking" education for all must be started from primary and secondary school . . . .

This is not just an anti-smoking campaign. This is a "war" we cannot lose.

In order to protect people's health as well as our next generation from being controlled by tobacco, we must say no to smoking.

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Chinese University of Hong Kong details research in lung cancer 

According to recent research from Hong Kong, People's Republic of China, "Chinese women in Hong Kong have among the highest incidence and mortality of lung cancer in the world, in spite of a low prevalence of smoking. We carried out this population-based case-control study to evaluate the associations of previous lung disease and family cancer history with the occurrence of lung cancer among them."

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香港室内全面禁烟 有盖大排档抽烟也被罚 

摘要：今年7月1日起，香港正式实行室内全面禁烟。究竟何为“室内”？近日，这一概念遭遇挑战。一香港人在类似于内地的有盖大排档里抽烟，被卫生署控烟办定罪为“室内吸烟”，他不满判决，上诉至高等法院。高等法院裁决：此类地点确实不属“室内”范围，控烟办败诉。

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香港所有报摊禁上香烟广告 [Of Hong Kong ban on all cigarette advertisements newsstand] 

由11月1日起，香港所有持牌小贩包括报摊，禁止展示任何形式烟草广告。

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• Display boxes for cigarettes may be illegal ($$) 

Display boxes showing cigarette packets replaced banners and posters at newspaper stands yesterday, as tobacco advertisements disappeared across Hong Kong in the final phase of the cigarette advertising ban.

But the government said the display boxes could be regarded as advertisements and it would consider prosecution. Both vendors and smokers said the ban would not affect how many cigarette packets they bought or sold.

Tobacco advertisements have been banned in newspapers, magazines, radio, television and public spaces since the 1990s, but newspaper stands and hawkers were exempted until yesterday.

In Causeway Bay, large display boxes equipped with spotlights were observed at almost all newspaper stands. Packets of cigarettes were seen revolving inside the boxes.

Ms Chim, a vendor, said tobacco companies helped her renovate the stand by adding the display boxes, and were still paying her about HK$3,000 a month in "advertising fees", even though her posters and banners had disappeared. But display boxes were not advertisements, she said. "It is not an advertisement if there are no words."

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It is not an advertisement if there are no words.
Ms Chim, a vendor who said tobacco companies helped her renovate her stand by adding display boxes, and were still paying her about HK$3,000 a month in "advertising fees"--even though her posters and banners had been taken down as Hong Kong's final phase of its advertising ban took effect.

• Designing A Safer Cigarette 

What if we had a less dangerous cigarette for people who can't kick the habit, letting them keep on smoking but stay alive longer while they're doing it? It's available in Canada, France, Russia and a few places in Asia. The 350 million smokers in China may also get their hands on it. The U.S.? Forget it.

It's another perverse result of the 1998 settlement that had tobacco companies--and, ultimately, their customers--chipping in to balance state budgets and pay for lawyers' yachts. The deal turned the big tobacco companies into a cartel and locked in their market shares. The state attorneys general who put together the $206 billion agreement ward off potential competitors so the money keeps flowing to their states. One way to fend off rivals: pounce on any company making health claims. How convenient for Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

In this case the target is an eight-year-old Hong Kong biotech company, Filligent. Its MicroBlue filter blocks many of the toxins that make a cigarette dangerous but doesn't disturb the ingredients that give it flavor and produce that seductive though addictive nicotine buzz. "For years the public health community has just assumed that the smoke from cigarettes is all bad," says Scott Ballin, director for the Alliance for Health, Economic & Agriculture Development in Washington, D.C., which is funded by economic development groups in tobacco-growing states and has been critical of the settlement. "Now advances in basic science have given us a much more nuanced understanding of what's in that stuff--what's harmful and what's mainly benign."

Fewer than 5% of the people who try to stop smoking succeed for as long as five years, says Filligent Chief Executive Melissa Mowbray-d'Arbela. So given the futility of getting smokers to end their addiction, tobacco experts such as Dr. Judith Mackay of the World Lung Foundation in New York say Filligent's product could be the next best thing to quitting.

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11月起香港将禁止所有烟草广告 

新华网１０月２８日电　香港特区政府卫生署控烟办公室２８日表示，从１１月１日起香港的各售报点将不能再展示烟草广告。至此，所有的烟草广告将在香港消失。

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Quarter of teens have smoked, HKU study finds ($$) 

One in four Hong Kong teenagers has smoked, and second-hand smoke can aggravate respiratory symptoms even among smokers. These are the main findings of a University of Hong Kong study published in the latest issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Researchers from the university's school of public health said the study was the first to show that exposure to second-hand smoke was associated with increased risk of persistent respiratory symptoms among adolescent smokers.

Current smokers who were exposed to second-hand smoke at home for five to seven days a week were 77 per cent more likely to suffer from respiratory symptoms than those who were not exposed, researchers said. If they also encountered second-hand smoke outside home, the percentage of risk was even higher, at 85 per cent.

Some 32,506 people aged 11 to 20 were recruited from 85 randomly selected schools in 2003 and 2004 and asked to fill in a questionnaire. The survey revealed 24 per cent had smoked - 9 per cent who were currently smoking, 13 per cent who had tried smoking and 2 per cent who had kicked the habit.

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