The Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health “Public Health on Call” podcast did an episode on our paper comparing the risks of e-cigarettes and cigarettes. You can listen to it here ..read more

The Juul documents that have been released so far contain an interesting document that lists people Juul considered “thought leaders” as of February 9, 2018. The spreadsheet contains several pages that suggest how Juul came up with this list. Another April 13, 2018 spreadsheet lists Juul’s “ratings of collaborators”: StatNews did a strong story on Dave Abrams and Ray Niaura’s undisclosed links with Juul, including allowing Juul to review a draft of their influential 2018 article in Annual Review of Public Health that argued that “a reframing of societal nicotine use through the lens of harm ..read more

Philip Morris and BAT both issued statements condemning ANVISA’s decision to maintain and strengthen e-cigarette regulations to keep the products (and other ENDS products) out of Brazil. Not surprisingly, they use the same generic arguments Big Tobacco uses against almost all regulations. The reality is that, as I noted in my post congratulating ANVISA, while there is some e-cigarette use in Brazil, it is much lower than in the countries, including the US, that have tried, without much success, to regulate e-cigarettes. Indeed, if the regulations were effective, you know that the companies wou ..read more

On Friday, April 19, 2024, the board of ANVISA, the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency strengthened its already-strong ban on electronic nicotine systems (ENDS), which includes e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products. In stark contrast to the US Biden Administration, which just caved to industry pressure and blocked the FDA’s well-conceived ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, ANVISA resisted pressure from the multinational tobacco companies to water down its prohibition on the import and sale of ENDS. The industry mobilized all their usual arguments, that these products reduced har ..read more

E-cigarettes and Harm Reduction: An Evidence Review, the latest in a series of reports it has published since 2007 endorsing e-cigarettes for harm reduction.  In this report, the RCP minimizes the adverse health effects of nicotine (beyond addiction), concluding that “There is little evidence of a long-term harmful physiological effect of nicotine that is not confounded by those of other constituents of tobacco smoke [page 8].” As with the RCP’s conclusions about health risks and the e-cigarettes and stopping smoking, the conclusion is based on a small fraction of the available evidence ..read more

Tobacco industry denormalization — the strategy of educating people about the predatory behavior of the tobacco industry — is used in many high income states and countries. Now, Roengrudee Patanavanich and I have published “Awareness of tobacco industry tactics among tobacco control communities in Thailand and its association with attitudes towards tobacco industry and perceptions of e-cigarettes” that assesses awareness of the tobacco companies’ tactics in the middle income country Thailand and how awareness of industry behavior affects knowledge and attitudes of tobacco control and public he ..read more

Today (April 16, 2024) the FDA released a new web page on The Relative Risks of Tobacco Products that irresponsibly promotes e-cigarettes as a lower risk alternative to cigarettes. This recommendation is based on the 2018 National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on e-cigarettes that concluded that e-cigarettes reduce exposure to some toxic chemicals. The problem is that, in the science of e-cigarettes, 2018 is ancient history. The NASEM report was a reasonable summary of the evidence on the harms of e-cigarettes as of August 2017, when the literature search it is based on ..read more

Jim Repace, who did the first quantitative risk assessment of secondhand smoke and lung cancer way back in 1980 and helped launch the clean indoor air movement, just published “Secondhand smoke infiltration in multiunit housing: Health effects and nicotine levels” in Indoor Environments. This paper is a combination literature review and summary of data he collected between 2006 and 2023 as part of his work as an expert consultant on exposure to secondhand smoking, including in litigation after he retired from the US EPA. This paper is a great resource for people interested in smokefree multiun ..read more

Karin Kasza and colleagues new well-done study, “Divergence in Cigarette Discontinuation Rates by Use of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS): Longitudinal Findings From the United States PATH Study Waves 1-6,” uses the large national PATH study to see if there were differences in real-world trends of adults stopping smoking before and after fourth generation e-cigarettes (pioneered by Juul) appeared. Fourth generation e-cigarettes add acid to the e-liquid, which generates nicotine salts that are easier to inhale, increasing the effective nicotine dose. Kasza and colleagues hypothesized ..read more

Philip Morris has aggressively promoted its heated tobacco product (HTP) IQOS all over the world as a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes based on the fact that IQOS delivers lower levels of some combustion products than cigarettes. IQOS is the most populat HTP in Japan, and other tobacco companies make similar claims for their HTP. Satomi Odani and colleagues make an important contribution to the actual effects of HTP on actual disease in people in their new paper “Association between heated tobacco product use and airway obstruction: a single-centre observational study, Japan.” They meas ..read more