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** 19 August 2024
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** UK
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** Free vapes to encourage adults to stop smoking (#1)
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** Free council vapes scheme helps smokers quit (#2)
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** Thousands of children and teens spiked with drinks in three years (#3)
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** International
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** Republic of Ireland: Hot school meals programme ‘making child obesity worse’ (#4)
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** China: footage shows worker testing 'up to 10,000 vapes a day' in factory (#5)
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** UK
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** Free vapes to encourage adults to stop smoking

Adults who want to quit smoking are being offered the chance to receive a free vape kit in exchange for cigarettes.

Available to residents in Bath and North East Somerset, the kit includes a rechargeable vape and a month's worth of e-liquids.

It comes as new data from Action on Smoking and Health, external showed that more than half of those who have quit smoking in the last five years used a vape during their successful attempt to stop.

Becky Reynolds, director of public health for Bath & North East Somerset Council said: "There is strong evidence that vaping helps people to quit smoking and it’s less harmful than smoking."

She added: "We are really pleased to be part of the national Swap to Stop programme in B&NES which means local smokers have an opportunity to try vaping at no cost to themselves.

"We know how difficult it is to quit smoking and most smokers will have tried many times. Vaping is currently the most popular and most effective way to quit so I encourage smokers in B&NES to take up this great offer."

Source: BBC News, 16 August 2024

See also: ASH – Use of vapes among adults in Great Britain 2024 ([link removed])
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** Free council vapes scheme helps smokers quit

Almost a quarter of people who sought help from a city stop-smoking service used a vape to quit, organisers said.

SmokeFree Hull said the figures, from between April 2023 and March 2024, "demonstrate the difference seeking help can make when stopping smoking".

The Hull City Council-run organisation offers free vapes to over-18s who want to give up the habit, as well as one-to-one help and advice.

The city has one of the UK's highest smoking rates with 20.9% of people smoking, compared with the national average of 12.9%, according to government data.

Last year the city was given an extra £500,000 by the government on top of its existing £481,177 budget to help reduce the number of smokers.

Recent figures from charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) suggested smoking cost Hull £352m a year.

The figure is made up of healthcare costs, as well as social care, the impact of poor health on ability to work, and calculations based on money spent on smoking, rather than within the local economy, the council said.

Source: BBC News, 17 August 2024

See also: ASH – Ready Reckoner ([link removed])
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** Thousands of children and teens spiked with drinks in three years

Almost 3,000 children and teenagers are believed to have fallen victim to drink-spiking or vape-spiking in the last three years, according to an investigation by i.

Freedom of Information requests sent to police forces in England and Wales show the number of recorded vape spiking incidents last year quadrupled since 2022.

Spiking is when a substance is put into a person’s body through a drink or injection without their consent. Vape spiking is when an e-cigarette contains unexpected intoxicants, when a person accepts a vape unaware that it has other substances in it or when someone’s vape is tampered with.

i’s investigation found that despite the rise in vape spiking among under 18s, it only makes up a small number compared to those who have unknowingly ingested drugs through tampered drinks.

More than a third of incidents between 2021 and 2023 were from spiked drinks, where police data was broken down by method of attack and by year.

The data shows 3,115 young victims were recorded as being spiked between 2019 and 2024, although data only included the end of 2019 and first half of 2024. That figure stands at 2,719 between 2020 and 2023.

The most common method of spiking of teens and children from 2019 that was recorded in police data was drink spiking (62%). This was followed by needle (17%), other/unknown (16%) and vape/cigarette spiking (3%).

However, while drink spiking was common throughout the time frame, our analysis showed that vape spiking is on the rise. The rates recorded in the first five months of 2024 had almost reached the levels seen during the entirety of 2023 and is set to overtake last year.

In the King’s Speech, Labour vowed to make spiking a standalone offence, although no details have yet emerged about its plans.

Source: i News, 18 August 2024

Editorial Note:

The headline has been amended to remove reference to vapes as there were only 31 incidents of vape spiking across the 5 year period the data covers, compared to 3,115 cases of spiking overall.

The article states that “almost a fifth of vapes confiscated from students contained illegal drugs, with 93% of those containing spice.” However, the research it refers to found that around 1 in 6 (16.6%) vapes confiscated from schools in England contained spice, not 93%.

See also: University of Bath - English school children unwittingly smoking spice-spiked vapes, finds University of Bath ([link removed])
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** International
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** Republic of Ireland: Hot school meals programme ‘making child obesity worse’

The Irish Government’s hot meals programme could be fuelling a surge in childhood obesity, an HSE expert has warned as it emerged that the vast majority of participating schools had no on-site inspections last year.

Heather Humphreys, the social protection minister, is spending more than €150 million a year on a programme that is potentially giving children “state-provided ultra-processed meals on a daily basis”, Professor Donal O’Shea, the HSE’s national clinical lead for obesity, has said.

O’Shea, a consultant endocrinologist, said that the rapid expansion of the scheme in recent years was a “cheap political one-liner” that had not been thought through. He contrasted the money spent on the hot school meals programme with the HSE’s model of care for treating overweight and obesity receiving only half the €19 million annual funding he said it needed.

“When you are not fully resourcing the treatment side of obesity I would have a particular issue with that,” he said. “I think certainly they should look at the balance between driving obesity and pouring €100 million a year into that and still being shy about treating obesity.”

O’Shea said there should be no processed food options available at all under the scheme, which has been championed by Humphreys and Simon Harris, the taoiseach (Deputy PM).

While nutritional standards for the programme state that processed meat or chicken products, fried foods, foods cooked in batter or breadcrumbs or food containing pastry should only be provided once a week, if at all, some school menus have a daily ultra-processed option. The Department of Social Protection said funding was not provided for food that did not comply with the standards. However, the department said that only 25% of schools in the scheme had on-site inspections last year and said it would review the number of on-site audits as the scheme expands.

Source: The Sunday Times, 18 August 2024
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** China: footage shows worker testing 'up to 10,000 vapes a day' in factory

A documentary maker went inside a Chinese vape factory and some of the things he saw were surprising.

YouTube channel Machina flew to one of the top disposable vape factories in Baoan, Shenzhen in China.

While there, they recorded how factories mass produce vape products, from their inner workings to their testing process.

The Machina video documents the final vape testing phase, the clip shows a worker holding numerous vapes in one hand as he takes a hit from each vape, with his own mouth.

When they asked the man about the number of vapes he tests each day, he explained that it was approximately 8,000 to 10,000 per day.

The clip gained obvious interest from vape users who shared it to Reddit and social media platforms.

Source: UNILAD, 18 August 2024
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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.

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