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** 25 February 2020
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** UK
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** Channel 4 Dispatches - The Secrets of Big Tobacco: Has Philip Morris Really Given Up Smoking? (#1)
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** England predicted to miss target of becoming smokefree by 2030 (#2)
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** Gains in UK life expectancy stall after decade of austerity, report says (#3)
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** How deprivation in the North has led to a health crisis (#4)
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** UK
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Over a decade has passed since major tobacco companies were found to have misled the public over the dangers of smoking. In 2008, Philip Morris International – or PMI - was spun off from Altria into a new company, headquartered in Switzerland. Now PMI says it wants to deliver a smokefree future.
Dispatches, in a joint investigation with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has examined PMI’s attempts to promote so called ‘reduced risk’ products ‘in the UK, whilst it ships hundreds of billions of cigarettes across the world.
Dispatches and The Guardian newspaper have seen internal Philip Morris International (PMI) documents from 2018 which show it putting in practice plans to influence public health policy in the UK. These documents reveal a plan to propose to the government the establishment of a £1 billion fund – financed by tobacco companies – “to support a smoke free UK.” Tobacco companies would have a role in developing the policy and oversight of how the fund is spent which would allow them to protect their market interests.
In Britain campaigners are concerned PMI will succeed in using reduced risk products to normalise and detoxify its brand.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of ASH said: “Philip Morris says it wants to end smoking, but it only wants to do it by establishing a replacement market because otherwise basically its business comes to an end. They say they only want to sell these replacements products to smokers … but if we genuinely end smoking then they're going to have to start selling these replacement products to non-smokers, erm because otherwise they’ll go bust.”
Source: Channel 4, 24 February 2020
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The government is expected to miss its target of England being smokefree by 2030 because of high rates of smoking in the poorest communities, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has warned in a new report.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, set that ambition in last year’s green paper on health prevention which spelled out his determination to “finish the job” of eradicating smoking, including an ultimatum for industry to make smoked tobacco obsolete by 2030. However, persistently high rates of smoking in more deprived areas means that on current trends England will not be smokefree until 2037, seven years later than hoped.
Smoking prevalence has fallen significantly in recent years. Overall, 14% of adults in England currently smoke, according to figures from the most recent annual population survey. Smokefree status is defined as when 5% or less adults smoke.
There are stark inequalities in smoking rates. While just 7.6% of the best-off continue to smoke, the rate is almost three times higher, at 22%, among the most deprived. Projections undertaken by CRUK show that it will take a further 20 years to get smoking down to 5% in England’s poorest communities. While prevalence is expected to fall to that level among the richest by 2025, it will take until 2045 to achieve the same rate among the most deprived communities.
CRUK wants ministers to try to deliver the 2030 pledge by putting more money into public information campaigns to discourage smoking and increase use of Stop Smoking services. Both have been cut in recent years as a result of Whitehall reducing the amount of public health funding it gives local councils. CRUK urging ministers to impose a levy on tobacco firms to help pay for those measures. That would yield about £265.5m in England and £315.2m across the UK, “easily affordable” sums for an industry that makes £1.5bn a year profit, CRUK says.
Source: The Guardian, 25 Feb 2020
See also:
Cancer Research UK. Smoking prevalence projections for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland based on data to 2018/19 ([link removed]) . February 2020
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Improvements in life expectancy in England have stalled for the first sustained period in 120 years after a decade of government austerity, according to a new report from Sir Michael Marmot.
Describing his findings as “shocking”, Marmot, who heads the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, highlighted rising child poverty, declines in education funding, an increase in zero-hours contracts and the large number of people resorting to food banks. The result was “ignored communities with poor conditions and little reason for hope”.
He has drawn a stronger link between austerity and the slowing increase in life expectancy than in his last report, in 2017. The largest decreases in life expectancy were seen in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in the North East, and the largest increases in the least deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in London.
Jennifer Dixon, the Health Foundation chief executive, said where there had been progress towards addressing inequalities, it had been “fragmented and underpowered”. Areas that needed immediate investment include child and in-work poverty, the public health grant to local authorities, and children’s services such as Sure Start, she added.
Source: Financial Times, 24 February 2020
See also:
Marmot M. Health equity in England: the Marmot review 10 years on. ([link removed]) BMJ 2020;368:m693
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According to data from the House of Commons library, rates of some of the most common health conditions are higher in areas of the North of England like Heywood and Middleton in Greater Manchester than the rest of the country. Some 14.7% have high blood pressure compared to 13.8% in England; 7.7% have diabetes (England: 6.7%); and 2.8% have one of the progressive lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (England: 1.9%).
Deprivation plays a big role in ill-health: 21% of Heywood and Middleton is classed as “highly deprived”, compared with 0% of Boris Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Life expectancy in the north has increased far slower than in the south. Between 1991 and 1993, men in Rochdale were expected to live on average to 71.4 – not too dissimilar from in Kensington and Chelsea in London, where male life expectancy then was 73. Now, the average man in the London borough will now live to 83.3 while his Rochdale counterpart will die at 77.2.
Aisha Connor, 48, a care assistant, says she thinks healthcare needs better funding locally. “A lot of our patients don’t get the drugs they need because they cost too much money so they just leave them. It’s disgusting,” she says. “I don’t think people in Middleton care much about their health… until there’s something wrong with them.”
Source: The Guardian, 25 February 2020
See also:
HoC Library: Constituency data: How healthy is your area? ([link removed])
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