Doctors urge WHO to rein in e-cigarettes market place

An e-cigarette. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA

A lot more than a hundred leading public overall health physicians and professionals from about the world have signed a letter to the director basic of the Planet Wellness Organisation, Margaret Chan, calling for new controls on e-cigarettes and warning that they may possibly be a stalking horse for the tobacco industry.

The authorities want the WHO to deliver e-cigarettes beneath the exact same tight controls as tobacco products, with bans on advertising and promotion. They say there is inadequate evidence so far that e-cigarettes are harmless and can aid folks to quit smoking.

Their most significant concern is that, if advertising and advertising are allowed, smoking will be “renormalised”, undermining public smoking bans and undoing decades of work to marginalise cigarettes and persuade people of the harm they do.

“By moving into the e-cigarette market, the tobacco sector is only maintaining its predatory practices and escalating earnings,” says the letter. It says the WHO must not be misled by the industry’s efforts to current itself as a partner, as it did with filters and “reduced-tar” cigarettes in the past before scientists showed that these issues did not minimize harm.

“If the tobacco sector were committed to minimizing the harm triggered by tobacco use, it would announce target dates to end manufacturing, marketing and advertising and selling its far more damaging products rather than just including e-cigarettes to its item mix and rapidly taking more than the e-cigarette market place.

“It would also right away desist from its aggressive opposition to tobacco manage policies such as tax increases, graphic health warnings and plain packaging,” says the letter, whose signatories incorporate Prof John Ashton, president of the United kingdom Faculty of Public Well being (FPH) Prof Rifat Atun, of the Harvard College of Public Wellness and Prof Robert Beaglehole, of the University of Auckland.

Supporting the public well being medical professionals are authorities in paediatrics and cardiovascular disease, such as Dr Hilary Cass, from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS trust in London, and Prof Helmut Gohlke, of the German Cardiac Society. Other signatories consist of Dr Jay Berkelhamer, of Emory University School of Medicine in the US, and Prof Frank Chaloupka, director of the Well being Policy Centre at the University of Illinois.

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The situation is controversial even inside the public overall health local community. This month, 53 scientists who consider a diverse view wrote to Chan (pdf), saying that regulating e-cigarettes in the very same way as tobacco items would expense lives by decreasing the variety of people making use of them to quit smoking.

“These items could be amid the most important health innovations of the 21st century – maybe conserving hundreds of hundreds of thousands of lives. The urge to manage and suppress them as tobacco items should be resisted,” they wrote.

But Simon Capewell, professor of clinical epidemiology at Liverpool University, speaking on behalf of the FPH, said its members were concerned by the boom in e-cigarette use and the feasible commercial interests behind it.

“The FPH is deeply concerned about the superficial evaluation of e-cigarettes and that the possible harms of e-cigarettes have been systematically underestimated,” he said. “The faculty is also concerned that the tobacco industry is cynically using discussions around e-cigarettes to undermine productive tobacco controls.”

He said the market was claiming e-cigarettes were solely a device to aid folks stop smoking, but the addition of flavours this kind of as strawberry and bubblegum to the nicotine vapour suggested youngsters have been being targeted. It was attainable that they might assist some people to quit, but a lot more evidence was essential, he explained. “From the faculty’s point of view, that is the single achievable worth they may well have.”

Prof Robert West, from University University London, whose recent study showed e-cigarettes were far more powerful than nicotine substitute therapy at helping individuals stop smoking, was a signatory to the earlier letter asking the WHO not to clamp down.

“The explanation I was keen to join in with the original letter is that what ever policies are suggested by WHO or any individual else, the crucial issue is they need to be based mostly on a dispassionate evaluation of the evidence and what is worrying is that that is not what they are receiving,” he mentioned.

He felt, even so, that concern about the tobacco industry’s involvement was valid. “That is a properly genuine argument as prolonged as no one is making an attempt to pull the wool in excess of anyone’s eyes,” he mentioned.

Doctors urge WHO to rein in e-cigarettes market place