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** 14 June 2022
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** UK
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** Sue Mountain: 'Why do we tolerate this?' Ex-smoker who started in primary school and had cancer three times welcomes calls to change the law (#1)
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** Pharmacies selling vapes should offer ‘behavioural support’ to users (#2)
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** Birmingham City Council collects over half a million from fines over dropped cigarette butts (#3)
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** Staffordshire: 'Confusing rules' leads to poor take-up of £2m a year health services (#4)
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** Social smoking: how badly does smoking affect your health and fitness? (#5)
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** Podcast: How much does smoking damage our mental health? (#6)
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** International
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** The Biden administration wants to slash nicotine levels in all cigarettes sold in the US (#7)
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** UK
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** Sue Mountain: 'Why do we tolerate this?' Ex-smoker who started in primary school and had cancer three times welcomes calls to change the law

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** Sue Mountain, 56, smoked for much of a life, but in 2012 was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, caused by smoking. A decade later, she's now had cancer three times.

Along with public health leaders around the North East, Sue has backed recommendations from Dr Javed Khan - who released a report last Thursday, 9^th June, calling for urgent action to "make smoking obsolete". Dr Khan made 15 recommendations ([link removed]) which include four "critical" measures for Government.

Sue said: "As someone who’s had smoking-related cancer three times I know the heartbreak that smoking can cause.”

"I started when I was a kid, before I realised how addictive it was. I started smoking at primary school. Increasing the age of sale won’t stop everyone smoking but it would help stop a lot of people. The fact is that smoking has killed nearly 8million people in the UK in the last 50 years. Why do we tolerate this? Why aren’t we doing more to stop people dying?"

She said that with tobacco companies making huge profits, "they need to pay for the damage they do".

"I don't want my grandchildren to go through what I went through. I think my view will be shared by many people who have smoked – it makes you even more concerned your loved ones don't follow. I could have bought half a house with the money I spent on smoking instead of cancer.”

Khan’s recommendations have also been welcomed by senior public health figures in the region. Dr Ruth Sharrock, a senior respiratory consultant in Gateshead and the NHS lead for tobacco dependency across the North East and North Cumbria said she saw the "devastating effects" of smoking every day.

"Whether it is patients struggling to walk with COPD and emphysema requiring oxygen or outpatients having to be told they have a lung cancer from smoking – the effects are utterly devastating to patients and their families.”

Source: Chronicle Live, 10 June 2022
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** Pharmacies selling vapes should offer ‘behavioural support’ to users

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** Pharmacy teams selling vapes should offer “behavioural support for smoking cessation” with each sale, the recent independent review into smokefree 2030 policies has recommended.

Pharmacies and pharmacists’ role should be maximised to help smokers quit, according to the review – which acknowledged that “the pharmacy contract is encouraging but does not go far enough”.

The review acknowledged that “vapes are not a ‘silver bullet’, nor are they totally risk free”. But “the government must embrace the promotion of vaping as an effective tool to help people to quit smoking tobacco”, it said.

Since March, pharmacies in England have been able to start offering an advanced smoking cessation service. The scheme allows patients who started their smoking cessation treatment in hospital – and who consent to be part of the ongoing service – to be referred to a participating pharmacy of their choice for continued support in the community.

However, the review suggested that “pharmacotherapy and skilled behavioural support” should not just be offered to people referred from hospital, and at least one pharmacy in “every neighbourhood” should provide this service.

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** Source: Chemist and Druggist, 9 June 2022
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**
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** See also: The Khan Review - Making Smoking Obsolete ([link removed])
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Read Article ([link removed] )


** Birmingham City Council collects over half a million from fines over dropped cigarette butts

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** Birmingham City Council has collected £600,000 of fines for dropped cigarette butts within a year.

Between May 2021 and May 2022, a total of 4,426 Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) were handed out to people caught dropping cigarettes and other smoking-related materials.

This makes up more than 98% of FPNs issued for littering, with just 84 fines being issued for other types of litter.

In September 2021, ten people from across the West Midlands were fined £220 on the same day at Birmingham Magistrates Court for “throwing down, leaving or otherwise depositing litter, namely a cigarette”.

The new data comes as a plan to raise the legal smoking age by one year, every year and place new taxes on tobacco companies was proposed in a review commissioned by Health Secretary Sajid Javid and carried out by Javed Khan, the former chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo's.

Source: ITV News, 14 June 2022
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** Staffordshire: 'Confusing rules' leads to poor take-up of £2m a year health services

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** Public health services in Staffordshire are set to be revamped after “confusing” eligibility rules resulted in poor take-up from residents over the last four years. Staffordshire County Council has been paying up to £2 million a year for a range of health interventions, such as weight management and smoking cessation, as part of the Healthy Communities Service since 2018.

But officers say that despite the services themselves being effective, overall uptake has been disappointing. They say this is due to eligibility being limited to the 158 neighbourhoods in the county with the greatest health needs, which has made the programme difficult to promote.

The council is now set to tender for a new Healthy Communities contract, which will run from next April. The council is planning to slash the number of services provided – which will allow it to abolish all eligibility restrictions for the remaining interventions.

Lead public health commissioner, Tony Bullock, told the council's health and care scrutiny committee that the existing service, provided by Everyone Health, had been effective with good feedback from residents, but there was a concern that not enough people were receiving support.

He said: "The restricted eligibility made it extremely difficult to promote. It was a confusing criteria to explain to the public and our partners found it difficult as well. That was a system for allocating scarce resources and we tried to include too many different interventions in the package, which meant we had to reduce the people who could receive those services.”

"I think we've learnt a lesson over the last four or five years, that it's much better to focus on a smaller number of issues."

Source: Stoke on Trent Live, 13 June 2022
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Read Article ([link removed] )


** Social smoking: how badly does smoking affect your health and fitness?
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**
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** Research shows that 13.8% of the UK’s adult population smokes, meaning around 6.7 million are lighting up every year.

One study ([link removed]) shows that smoking just one cigarette per day carries a greater than expected risk of developing coronary heart disease and stroke, with relative risks higher among women than men. Research ([link removed]) also reveals that lifelong casual smokers carry a 72% higher mortality risk than non-smokers.
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**
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** Tips on how to stop casual smoking from Hazel Cheeseman, deputy chief executive at ASH:
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1.
** Try the ‘not a puff’ rule. This is a key rule in stopping – tell yourself that you will not have even a single puff of a cigarette. Setting clear rules helps us to change our behaviour
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2.
** Work out your triggers. Think about the times when you’re at risk of smoking and make a plan about how you’ll avoid smoking. This can help us stop unthinkingly doing the things we always do, like reaching for a cigarette when stressed or at the pub.
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** Use an alternative. Switching to something like a vape for those times when you’re at risk of smoking can make a big difference.
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** Quit with friends. People who quit together are more likely to stay cigarette-free than when doing it alone – if you’re a social smoker, why not be a social quitter?
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5.
** Talk to a health professional. If you want to stop then getting advice from a trained professional is the most proven route to success. There are local stop smoking services (try Smokefree ([link removed]) ) and GPs and pharmacies can also help.
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**
Source: Stylist, 14 June 2022
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Read Article ([link removed])


** Podcast: How much does smoking damage our mental health?
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**
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** According to some estimates smoking causes one in 10 deaths worldwide. A lesser known side-effect of cigarettes is the damage they cause to our mental health. Yet, the rates of smoking among people with mental health conditions are much higher than the rest of the population.

Last week, the UK government published the Khan review, an independent report looking at how England could become smoke free by 2030. One of the recommendations was to tackle the issue of mental health and smoking.

Madeleine Finlay speaks to Dr Gemma Taylor, epidemiologist at the University of Bath and research fellow at Cancer UK, about how significant this link is, what we can do to break it, and how to dispel the myth that smoking is a stress reliever.

Source: The Guardian, 14 June 2022
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Listen ([link removed] )


** International
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** The Biden administration wants to slash nicotine levels in all cigarettes sold in the US
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**
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** New rules that would force tobacco companies to dramatically reduce the amount of nicotine in all cigarettes sold in the US are being drawn up, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Biden administration wants all cigarettes to have minimal or nonaddictive levels of nicotine, sources told The Journal, but it could take several years for the regulations to take effect.

While cigarettes are known to cause cancer, heart disease, and lung disease, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the thousands of other components in cigarette smoke rather than nicotine itself were to blame.

The most recent data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that more than 480,000 deaths in the US each year are caused by cigarette smoking, with more than 41,000 deaths related to second-hand smoke exposure, or passive smoking.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical found in cigarettes and other tobacco products. The FDA began a wide-ranging review of tobacco and nicotine regulation in 2017 in a bid to tackle addiction, protect young people and help smokers to quit.

The FDA has been focusing on lowering nicotine levels since the 1990s as it attempts to crack down on cigarette sales to minors, but the Supreme Court had found the FDA wasn't permitted to do so at the time.

Source: Business Insider, 11 June 2022
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**
See also: Wall Street Journal (Paywalled) - Biden Administration to Pursue Rule Requiring Less Nicotine in U.S. Cigarettes ([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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