|
|
|
|
MPs urged to crack down on vapes sold in shops
Trade bodies and charities have urged the government to impose stricter legislation on vaping within convenience stores, recommending restrictions on display, excise duties and fines of at least £10,000 for retailers caught selling to under-18s.
Providing evidence on the issue, Action on Smoking Health (ASH) chief executive Deborah Arnott submitted proposals that could affect vaping sales in convenience stores. This included the introduction of a £5 excise duty on disposable vapes.
Arnott urged MPs to impose restrictions making vapes less appealing to children by removing colourful branding, names associated with confectionery and cartoon characters. She also suggested moving the products out of reach for children and making retailers remove vapes from the shop floor.
In a sign of the public pressure on the government to adopt many of theses measures, freedom of information requests by RN revealed there have been more than 600 submissions to the government’s call for evidence on vaping.
Source: Better Retailing, 6 July 2023
|
|
Austerity has led to NHS quality of care declining in key areas, study finds
The quality of care that the NHS provides has got worse in many key areas and patients’ long waits to access treatment could become even more common, research has found.
The coalition government’s austerity programme in the early 2010s led to the heath service no longer being able to meet key waiting time targets, the Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation said.
The big fall in the government’s funding of the NHS produced “a turning point” that meant its quality of care began to decline between mid-2013 and mid-2014 and has got progressively worse since, the study concluded.
Analysis by the two thinktanks’ joint Quality Watch programme found, amongst other things, that it has become harder for patients to see a named GP, fewer people with long-term health conditions such as cancer, diabetes and depression, are getting enough help to manage their condition and only 6% of midwives think their maternity unit has enough staff to do its job properly.
Jessica Morris, a Nuffield Trust fellow who leads the programme, said: ‘’There has also been a steep decline in preventive health care, mental health and care for children and young people, all of which risk creating a cycle of much greater need further down the line for other heath services.”
Some areas of healthcare have improved in recent years, the thinktanks also found, citing an ongoing fall in smoking rates, a drop in teenage pregnancy and high uptake of adult flu jabs.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “This government is ensuring quality of care for patients by sustaining an NHS that is fit for both the challenges of today and the future. This includes raising core health and care spending to over £190bn by 2024-25 – an increase of £42bn since 2019-20’
Source: The Guardian, 5 July 2023
|
|
Smoking Causes Coughing review – cigarette-superhero comedy is refreshingly immature
French film-maker and former DJ Quentin Dupieux releases '' a fantastically silly and magnificently inconsequential comedy''
In modern-day France, a team of superheroes called the Tobacco Force do battle with bizarrely rubbery monsters. These warriors of virtue are named after the constituent ingredients of cigarettes: Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). Wearing costumes and helmets, like a cross between the Power Rangers and Daft Punk, they kill these evil beasts by surrounding them and blowing their individual vapours which combine to form fatal cigarette smoke.
Source: The Guardian, 5 July 2023
|
|
As low-nicotine cigarettes hit the market, anti-smoking groups press for wider standard
The idea seems simple enough. Preserve all the rituals of smoking: Light up a cigarette, inhale the smoke, including the nasty stuff that can kill you, and exhale. But remove most of the nicotine, the chemical that makes tobacco so darn hard to quit, to help smokers smoke less.
The Food and Drug Administration has been contemplating that strategy for at least six years. Now, the first authorized cigarettes with 95% less nicotine than traditional smokes are coming to California, Florida, and Texas in early July, after a year of test-marketing in Illinois and Colorado.
Anti-smoking groups are urging federal regulators to expand on their original plan of setting a low-nicotine standard for all combustible cigarettes to make them minimally or nonaddictive. They expect the FDA to take the next step in that industrywide regulatory process as early as this fall.
Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause more than 480,000 deaths a year in the U.S., including from secondhand smoke, and contributes to tobacco use being the leading preventable cause of death nationally. In 2018, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote that setting a maximum nicotine level "could result in more than 8 million fewer tobacco-caused deaths through the end of the century—an undeniable public health benefit."
Source: Medical Press, 5 July 2023
|
|
The NHS in England at 75: priorities for the future
This report from the NHS Assembly aims to help the NHS, nationally and locally, plan how to respond to long term opportunities and challenges. It sets out what is most valuable about the NHS, what most needs to change, and what is needed for the NHS to continue fulfilling its fundamental mission in a new context.
Source: NHS Assembly 23 June 2023
|
|
Have you been forwarded this email? Subscribe to ASH Daily News here.
For more information email [email protected] or visit www.ash.org.uk
@ASHorguk
ASH Daily News is a digest of published news on smoking-related topics. ASH is not responsible for the content of external websites. ASH does not necessarily endorse the material contained in this bulletin.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
