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** 10 April 2024
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** UK
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** BMJ: Outcry as Philip Morris International funds smoking cessation courses on Medscape (#3)
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** Imperial Brands expects higher first-half profit on strong tobacco pricing (#4)
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** World Health Organization criticized by fact-checkers for claiming vaping can cause a seizure within 24 hours (#1)
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** UK
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** Outcry as Philip Morris International funds smoking cessation courses on Medscape
A leading medical information company has been urged to cancel a series of new education courses on smoking cessation funded by the tobacco industry giant Philip Morris International (PMI).
Physicians and academics have criticised Medscape for partnering with PMI on five courses launched in the past few months, and they have called for stricter oversight by certification bodies.
Anna Gilmore, professor of public health and director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath, UK, said that Medscape had “now lost all credibility and has some serious questions to answer. PMI lost all credibility decades ago, despite its ceaseless and highly misleading attempts to rehabilitate its image. It has now sunk to a new low.”
Medscape has temporarily taken down some of the courses while it carries out a review, but it told The BMJ that it had so far “found no evidence of deviation from Medscape’s strict quality and integrity standards.”
Critics said that the content tended to portray non-cigarette nicotine products as relatively harmless, therefore aligning with the commercial interests of PMI, which also sells e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches, and snus.
Tess Legg, research associate at the University of Bath, said that funding education for health professionals was “part of a wider plan to claw back some credibility for the tobacco industry which has seen its image take a nosedive, not least because of its decades long manipulation of science.”
Source: The BMJ, 9 April 2024
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** Imperial Brands expects higher first-half profit on strong tobacco pricing
Imperial Brands (IMB.L) said on Tuesday its profit for the first half of the year will be higher on the back of strong tobacco pricing and increased sales of its products such as disposable vapes.
The maker of Winston cigarettes and Backwoods cigars expects to meet its full-year expectations of growing net revenue and delivering a step up in adjusted operating profit growth.
Imperial Brands said last year it would increase prices in its key markets to offset declining volumes, while the company also faces regulatory pressures such as a potential UK ban on cigarette sales to younger people.
For the full-year, on a constant currency basis, tobacco and next generation product (NGP) like disposable vapes net revenue is expected to grow at a low single-digit percentage rate.
Analysts had expected total tobacco and NGP revenue to be about 8.1 billion pounds, according to company-provided estimates.
Source: Reuters, 9 April 2024
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** BMJ: World Health Organization criticized by fact-checkers for claiming vaping can cause a seizure within 24 hours
The World Health Organisation was fact checked on X by users, prompting the social platform to post a Community Note.
The note said: “This post is based on inconclusive evidence utilizing studies that have not been peer reviewed. The claim is based on approximately 120 incidents that occurred since 2019 with an inconclusive outcome.”
Dr Charles Gardner, a Brooklyn-based developmental neurobiologist, tweeted: “Please provide peer-reviewed evidence for this claim that vaping causes seizures "typically within 24 hours." If you cannot do this, then please delete your tweet. NOTE: I have searched the literature and cannot find one study showing higher risk of seizures.”
The community note on X included a link to an editorial paper critiquing a 2019 study that linked seizures to vaping.
The original study suggested that the nicotine in vapes could have proconvulsant effects, however, the editorial said details of the study “raise questions about a causal link, which needs to be considered in assessing the actual health threat of nicotine vaping for youth.”
It added that: “A big question is why nicotine inhaled from e-cigarettes should cause seizures, whereas nicotine from conventional cigarettes does not.”
The authors said a person would need to inhale a very large dose of nicotine in order to elicit a seizure, but the amount of the substance in a vaping device is much less compared to that in a traditional cigarette.
Another shortcoming of the 2019 study was that it analysed self-reported seizure events where descriptions of these differed and in most cases were not evaluated by medical professionals.
Source: Daily Mail, 9 April 2024
See also: Seizures After Vaping Nicotine in Youth: A Canary or a Red Herring? ([link removed](19)30525-7/fulltext )
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