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** 25 June 2021
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** UK
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** Pregnant women could get £400 vouchers to quit smoking under new NHS plans (#1)
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** Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out (#2)
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** Health Secretary Matt Hancock admits breaking social distance rules with aide (#3)
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** International
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** US: FDA Commissioner refuses to commit to banning or limiting flavoured e-cigarettes despite pressure from Democrats in Congress (#4)
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** Turkey to keep fixed tax on alcohol, tobacco until year-end to ease inflation (#5)
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** Link of the Week
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** NICE guidance consultation - Tobacco: preventing uptake, promoting quitting and treating dependence (#6)
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** UK
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**
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** Pregnant women could receive £400 in shopping vouchers to quit smoking under new financial incentive plans being considered by the NHS. Under the scheme, pregnant women would get the vouchers if they joined a Stop Smoking Service and passed carbon monoxide breath tests to prove that they have quit smoking. The women could receive a maximum of £10 a week but would miss out on rewards if they relapsed.

Currently, one in 10 pregnant women smoke. Deborah Arnott, chief executive of ASH, says that the scheme would be effective: “Vouchers are an obvious one because they’ve been used in a number of different places. It reinforces the idea that quitting is a positive step forward. You need to be given advice and help and support as well, but there’s research to show it works.”. Bob Blackman, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health, added that: “it’s only where voucher schemes combined with help to quit have been put in place that smoking in pregnancy is going down.”

Dr Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, Senior Research Fellow in Health Behaviours, University of Oxford, said that the evidence supported extending financial incentive schemes. "Evidence shows these programmes also work outside of pregnancy. It would be positive to see them used across a range of contexts,” she said. NHS chiefs said that the scheme could persuade an average of 177 out of 1,000 smoking mums to quit and trials showed it was ''effective and cost effective’’.

The proposal forms part of new National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance, currently under consultation, on tackling the health burden of smoking. The guidance also recommends that all smokers should be given advice about e-cigarettes and vaping if they want to quit. NICE has sent the suggestion for ministers to consider.

Source: The Sun, 25 June 2021
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** Scientists say that a new simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer before any clinical signs or symptoms have emerged in a person is accurate enough to be rolled out as a screening test. The test, which is also being piloted by NHS England in the autumn, is aimed at people at higher risk of the disease including patients aged 50 or older.

The test is able to identify many types of the disease that are difficult to diagnose in the early stages such as head and neck, ovarian, pancreatic, oesophageal, and some blood cancers. Developed by US-based company Grail, it looks for chemical changes in fragments of genetic code – cell-free DNA (cfDNA) – that leak from tumours into the bloodstream.

The latest study on the test, published in the journal Annals of Oncology, analysed the performance of the test in 2,823 people with the disease and 1,254 people without. It correctly identified when cancer was present in 51.5% of cases, across all stages of the disease, and wrongly detected cancer in only 0.5% of cases. The test also correctly identified the tissue in which the cancer was located in the body in 88.7% of cases.

The results of the NHS pilot of the test, which will include 140,000 participants, are expected by 2023. Professor Peter Johnson, national NHS clinical director for cancer, said: “This latest study provides further evidence that blood tests like this could help the NHS meet its ambitious target of finding three-quarters of cancers at an early stage, when they have the highest chance of cure’’.

Source: The Guardian, 25 June 2021
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**

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has admitted breaking social distancing rules after pictures of him kissing an aide taken in early May were published in The Sun. Hancock made Coldangelo a non-executive director of the health department in September 2020. Coldangelo’s role as non-executive director of the Department of Health comes with a £15,000 salary and involves 15-to-20 days of work per year.

A government spokesman said that no rules had been broken with the appointment and it was made ''in the usual way’’ whilst Transport Secretary Grant Shapps called it a ''personal’’ matter. In May last year, epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson resigned from the government's scientific advisory group (SAGE) after it emerged he had broken lockdown rules when a woman he was reportedly in a relationship with visited his home.

At the time Mr Hancock called Prof Ferguson's actions "extraordinary", adding that social distancing rules were "there for everyone" and were "deadly serious". Labour's First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, said Mr Hancock had been "quick to condemn" Prof Ferguson, adding: "Certainly here in Wales I always expect the whole of our ministerial team to observe the rules we expect other people to observe."

Source: BBC News, 25 June 2021
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** International
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** Acting US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr Janet Woodcock has refused to commit to banning or limiting flavoured e-cigarettes as she addressed the US House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday 23rd June. Democrats, led by Rep Katue Porter of California, had called on the FDA to ban flavoured e-cigarettes, citing concerns that they act as a gateway to children forming a nicotine addiction.

E-cigarette flavourings have been the subject of debate in the US and around the world, including within the European Union, as some believe that young people who smoke flavoured vapes then transition to other products such as menthol cigarettes. The FDA has already moved to ban menthol cigarettes after being pushed by President Biden to do so.

Some areas of the US have already banned the sale of flavoured e-cigarettes such as the state of New York last year. Campaigners say flavoured products are often marketed to children using common candy names and targeted advertising. The FDA has so far resisted an outright ban on flavours, with some studies finding that a flavoured e-cigarette ban could lead some teens to go straight to smoking cigarettes.

Source: Mail On Sunday, 24 June 2021
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** A decree published on Friday 25th June has stated that Turkey will keep a tax on alcohol and tobacco products unchanged until the end of the year, in a move designed to ease some upward pressure on inflation. Levels of the special consumption tax were already left unchanged in January from the level set in July 2020, as Turkey works to bring down inflation which has been stuck in double digits for most of the last four years. The alcoholic beverages and tobacco component makes up 6.06% of the inflation basket in Turkey, with cigarettes making up a large part of that.

Source: Reuters, 25 June 2021
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** Link of the Week
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**

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** NICE and PHE publish comprehensive draft guideline to tackle the health burden of smoking: consultation runs until 6^th August 2021.

NICE has today (25^th June 2021) released draft guidance to help healthcare practitioners to tackle the health burden of smoking, developed in collaboration with Public Health England. The consultation runs until 6^th August and the final guidance is due for publication on 30^th November 2021.
Key draft recommendations include:
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** Patients should be advised about using nicotine-containing e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation tool as the evidence shows that they are similarly effective to other cessation options. They should be advised on where they can find information on nicotine-containing e-cigarettes, how to use them correctly, and that they should stop smoking completely if they use nicotine-containing e-cigarettes.
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** Pregnant women who are referred to a stop-smoking service should be offered vouchers to encourage them to stop smoking.
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** The consultation is available here ([link removed]) . The NICE/PHE press release is available here ([link removed]) .
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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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