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** 30 August 2023
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** UK
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** Illegal tobacco and vapes worth £45k seized in Huddersfield (#1)
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** The legal loophole that means doctors don't have to declare if 'independent' research is actually funded by a drugs giant (#2)
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** International
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** USA: Study finds e-cigarette manufacturers use targeted marketing to lure in young adults (#3)
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** UK
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** Illegal tobacco and vapes worth £45k seized in Huddersfield

Illegal tobacco products and vapes worth £45,000 have been confiscated from shops in Huddersfield.

Cigarettes and rolling tobacco were seized as well as disposable vapes, which West Yorkshire Police believe may have been sold to children.

The haul is part of a wider operation in which officers have seized £100,000 worth of goods in the past year.

Police warned cash from the sale of such goods can be used to fund organised crime.

Officers raided a number of businesses as part of a joint investigation between West Yorkshire Trading Standards and the Huddersfield Town Centre Team, and seized 12,000 cigarettes, four kilograms of rolling tobacco and 4,500 vapes, with a retail value of £45,000.

Source: BBC news, 29 August 2023
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** The legal loophole that means doctors don't have to declare if 'independent' research is actually funded by a drugs giant

When you take a powerful medicine, or have a medical device implanted in your body, you want to be sure its safety and effectiveness credentials are backed up by independent studies.

That is, free from medical companies' efforts to oversell the benefits or, worse, cover up the fact that their products may be useless or even potentially harmful.

Yet numerous studies show commercial money significantly influences researchers to sway clinical trial results in favour of the drug or device they are testing.

In the U.S., the Physician Payments Sunshine Act — passed into law in 2010 — requires all medical companies to disclose payments made to researchers and healthcare professionals, so they can be scrutinised by independent experts. In the UK, no such law exists.

Instead, it is at the discretion of the researcher or company to disclose any fees, sponsorship, expenses or other forms of financial backing. Very often, evidence shows, they choose to keep this information secret.

Few would argue against the UK needing the same U.S.-style legislation, but campaigners fear that ministers are deliberately fudging the issue so we may never get a useable system.

In January, the Commons Health and Social Care Committee said it had been told by William Vineall, director of NHS Quality, Safety and Investigations at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), that he expected local pilot schemes to implement Sunshine Act-type openness would 'run during 2023'.

Women's Health Minister Maria Caulfield also promised implementation of the new system this year. But Health Minister Will Quince has since admitted there's no date set for the necessary regulations to be put before Parliament.

Meanwhile, with medicines, the only information on researchers' conflicts of interests is a voluntary system for researchers working on branded medicines (drugs with patents held by pharmaceutical companies).

This system, run by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), is called Disclosure UK. But because it is only voluntary, researchers can opt out of having their payment details made publicly available. Nor does the system highlight if a doctor or researcher has opted out.

Past figures from the ABPI show that in 2018, for example, four out of ten professionals on the Disclosure UK database withheld information about any payment or relationship without having to give any reasons for so doing.

Baroness Cumberlege, who wrote the First Do No Harm report, told Good Health: 'The public have a right to know when the pharmaceutical and devices industries pay clinicians or fund research. They also have a right to know where doctors receive income.

'In my review we called for a register of payments by industry to doctors, and the declaration of financial interests by doctors themselves. That was three years ago — I am keen to see progress.'

Source: The Daily Mail, 28 August 2023

See also: Baroness Cumberlege – First Do No Harm: The report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review ([link removed])
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** International
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** USA: Study finds e-cigarette manufacturers use targeted marketing to lure in young adults

Research led by Minji Kim, assistant professor of health promotion, education, and behavior, has found that marketing strategies used by e-cigarette manufacturers increase the likelihood of uptake among otherwise low-risk young adults. These widespread but under-researched strategies use psychographic targeting to appeal to new users based on lifestyles, attitudes and values. Kim published the results in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

"Young adults who currently don't use tobacco and nicotine products are susceptible to these advertisements, which may result in the initiation of e-cigarette use for individuals who were otherwise less likely to use these products," Kim says. "To address this increased risk, stricter marketing regulations for emerging tobacco and nicotine products are needed to reduce marketing exposure."

The researchers analyzed responses from an experiment with 2,100 young adults. The participants were divided into three primary groups based on their peer crowd affiliation: Mainstream, Young Professional, Hip Hop/Hipster/Partier. They randomly selected half from each subgroup to view existing print and online e-cigarette advertisements that reflected their lifestyles, and then answered questions about their effects. The other half viewed advertisements that featured lifestyles that did not match their own, and then answered the same questions.

When considering all participants at the same time, their analysis did not reveal that peer crowd matching led them to like the e-cigarette advertisements more; however, the researchers did find that responses differed based on their tobacco and nicotine use status.

For example, advertisements featuring members of a respondent's peer crowd led to increases in character liking and ad evaluation only among those who currently do not use tobacco and nicotine products. This finding suggests that people who are at low risk for tobacco use—in other words, current non-users—are more likely to respond favorably to advertisements depicting their peer crowd and increasing their susceptibility to begin using e-cigarettes.

"Marketing regulations, such as an advertising ban on channels that can reach non-users, could minimize low-risk young adults' exposure to e-cigarette advertising," Kim says. "Future studies should examine how communication campaigns and regulations can counteract these targeted tobacco and nicotine marketing effects."

Source: Medical Xpress, 29 August 2023

See also: Nicotine & Tobacco Research - Young Adult Responses to Peer Crowd-Based Targeting in E-cigarette Advertisements: An Experimental Study ([link removed])
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