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Sarah Woolnough has been appointed as the next chief executive of Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation Partnership. Woolnough, who is executive director of policy and information at Cancer Research UK, will succeed Kay Boycott in December. Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation merged in January, although they maintain separate identities.
Woolnough, who has led policy at CRUK since 2005, has previously served as a senior policy advisor at the Department of Health and Social Care and as a policy officer at the Sport and Recreation Alliance. She is also a trustee of MQ: Transforming Mental Health and the National Cancer Research Institute, and has previously sat on the boards of the premature baby charity Bliss, the Association of Medical Research Charities and Action on Smoking and Health (UK).
Woolnough said in a statement that it was an honour to have been appointed to the new role. “Respiratory health is a cause I care deeply about, and it’s been inspiring to see the extraordinary lengths that they’ve gone to in supporting people with lung conditions over many years, and most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic,” she added.
Source: Third Sector, 25 August 2020
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Authorities have uncovered hidden stashes of illegal cigarettes and rolling tobacco at several shops in Lincoln. Officers from Lincolnshire Police, Lincolnshire County Council and HMRC carried out raids on premises in the city in February and August.
In one store, sniffer dogs alerted officers to illegal cigarettes which were hidden in three secret compartments behind a wall in a toilet. In another, officers discovered the illegal products hidden in a compartment with a magnetic lock, after they noticed the grouting on one section of a tiled wall was a different colour.
Officers seized 50,000 cigarettes and 2kg of rolling tobacco from five stores in February and a further 40,000 illicit cigarettes and 1.5kgs of tobacco from three of the same stores earlier this month.
One person was arrested and trading standards investigations are ongoing to prosecute the retailers.
Source: Lincolnshire Live, 26 August 2020
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Higher rates of e-cigarette and marijuana use in US states did not result in more e-cigarette or vaping-related lung injuries (known as EVALI), a new study from the Yale School of Public Health finds.
Published in the journal Addiction, the study considers the relationship between states' total reported EVALI cases per capita as of January 2020, and pre-outbreak rates of adult vaping and marijuana use. Results show that higher rates of vaping and marijuana use are associated with fewer EVALI cases per capita.
"If e-cigarette or marijuana use per se drove this outbreak, areas with more engagement in those behaviours should show a higher EVALI prevalence," said Assistant Professor Abigail Friedman, the study's author. "This study finds the opposite result. Alongside geographic clusters of high EVALI prevalence states, these findings are more consistent with locally available e-liquids or additives driving the EVALI outbreak than a widely used, nationally-available product."
In February 2020, the CDC concluded its national updates, and officially classified vitamin E acetate, an additive long linked to EVALI and most common in e-liquids containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) that are informally-sourced— mainly purchased off the street or home-mixed—as "a primary cause of EVALI."
The EVALI outbreak has motivated a variety of state and federal legislation to restrict sales of nicotine containing e-cigarettes, including a temporary ban on all e-cigarette sales in Massachusetts in late-2019 and bans on flavoured e-cigarette sales in several states and localities. However, if the goal was to reduce EVALI risks, the study suggests that those policies may have targeted the wrong behaviour.
A negative relationship between EVALI prevalence and rates of pre-outbreak vaping and marijuana use suggests that well-established markets may have crowded-out use of riskier, informally sourced e-liquids, Friedman said.
Source: Medical Xpress, 25 August 2020
See also:
Friedman A. Association of Vaping‐related Lung Injuries with Rates of E‐cigarette and Cannabis Use across US States. Addiction.
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The Institute of Leadership and Development (INSLA), a civil society organization has called on the Government to reject any support from the tobacco industry and its affiliates in the management, control, and treatment of COVID-19 in Ghana.
It also urged the Government to place a temporary ban on the sale and use of tobacco products pending the finding of a vaccine or sustainable treatment of the COVID-19.
Mr Benjamin Anabila, the Director of INSLA, which is a member of the African Tobacco Control Alliance (ATCA), said tobacco smoking was a known and proven risk fact for many respiratory infections and increases the severity of respiratory diseases. He said that the tobacco industry had engaged in humanitarian gestures like the offering of financial donations and equipment including ventilators, hand sanitizers, and face marks to governments, as a way to sway authorities and the public from the negative image of its products.
“Such gestures have been identified in countries like Uganda and Zambia, and the tobacco industry continues to use it to clean its image in the continent. It is usually aimed at [influencing] governments… with regards to the implementation of tobacco control and public health policies in the future,” Mr Anabila said. He continued: “The tobacco industry engages in this activity to portray itself as a responsible entity which cares for the well-being of COVID-19 patients when in effect, its products only help to aggravate their situation.”
Mr Anabila said historically, the tobacco industry and its allies have engaged in such Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives to give the impression that it is a development partner and a stakeholder, when its product kill eight million people around the world annually.
Source: GNA, 25 August 2020
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