Evidence is mounting that plain cigarette packaging is helping prevent young people from becoming addicted, life-long customers of big tobacco. From January 2012, all tobacco products have been sold in…
Tobacco companies cajole, convince, and promote their deadly products to billions across the globe.
Nikolai Vassiliev
Lung cancer, a leg amputation, or gasping for air as a result of emphysema are not fun ways of ending one’s life. All are common outcomes of smoking, and if current global patterns of smoking continue…
We can all, in general, expect to live a little longer than our grandparents did – and, until recently, many of us have had expectations to live to an older age than our own parents. In addition to living…
Given just how well established anti-smoking campaigns in Britain now are, many of today’s smokers, and younger smokers in particular, have taken up the habit with at least some awareness of the damaging…
Philipp Hessel, London School of Economics and Political Science e Mauricio Avendano, London School of Economics and Political Science
Men who leave school or university during a recession experience better health in later life than those who graduate during a boom, while women experience worse health if leaving school or university during…
Low birth weight is associated with smoking.
Ariel Schalit/AP
Tobacco smoke contains thousands of compounds, many of them toxic and capable of causing injury throughout the body. Because of this high toxicity of tobacco smoke, many diseases have long been causally…
The research debunks the ‘smoking makes you relaxed’ myth.
ydhsu/Flickr
Quitting smoking is associated with reduced depression and anxiety, and has a similar effect to antidepressant drugs for mood disorders, British researchers have found. Published today in the journal BMJ…
The clock is ticking for Coles and Woolworths to announce they’ll stop selling cigarettes.
Image from shutterstock.com
The announcement by CVS, one of the largest drug store chains in the United States, that it will cease selling tobacco by October this year will have Coles’ and Woolworths’ public relations in a spin…
E-cigarettes are increasingly popular in a number of countries including the UK, while in others such as Norway and Brazil they are banned altogether. So amid all these differences in policy, what do we…
Stormy weather hits New Zealand’s capital, Wellington.
Flickr.com/wiifm69 (Sean Hamlin)
Jim Salinger, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
A recent headline – Failed doubters trust leaves taxpayers six-figure loss – marked the end of a four-year epic saga of secretly-funded climate denial, harassment of scientists and tying-up of valuable…
Statistics on tobacco deaths have become banal for many.
Image from shutterstock.com
The Russian dictator Joseph Stalin infamously said that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic. And in tobacco control, there are statistics to die for. Tobacco caused about 100 million…
Just over 15% of Australians smoke daily and a further 1.5% smoke each week.
Flickr/benessere
If you only light up when you’re drinking or out with friends, you probably don’t identify as a smoker or consider the health impact of the occasional fag. Social smokers don’t usually smoke every day…
Almost all companies contribute money to charity and many would argue that corporate donations make a positive difference in the world. But this hopeful take on corporate philanthropy sits uneasily with…
E-cigarettes are battery operated units that vapourise fluids into fine particles that can be inhaled deep into the lungs.
Image from shutterstock.com
As rates of smoking fall in Australia, electronic cigarette manufacturers are moving in. Liberty Flights last week released an (awful) online ad to “create awareness” of electronic or e-cigarettes in the…
Boarded up: how companies are trumping our health.
Eschipul
If I asked you to name some of the current threats to your health, “international trade law” probably wouldn’t be on the tip of your tongue. Yet trade agreements, and the way we negotiate them, can affect…
Tobacco, like other substances, are likely to become part of the prison contraband trade.
Image from shutterstock.com
From May next year, Queensland prisoners will no longer be able to smoke cigarettes. Smoking in cells was prohibited in Queensland facilities in 2008, but as of next year the prohibition will extend to…
In 1952 the first paper was published linking smoking with death. About 50 years later governments around the world started to ban smoking advertising from TV, billboards and sporting venues. Then, eventually…
Tobacco use causes more than five million deaths every year across the world.
MilitaryHealth/Flickr
Reema Rattan, The Conversation e Isabelle Knight, The Conversation
Editors of journals published by the BMJ Group will no longer consider publishing research that is partly or wholly funded by the tobacco industry, the journals have said in an editorial published this…
Tobacco doesn’t immediately conjure up ideas of fuel for cars and planes. But that’s precisely what a three-year, $4.8m project from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E PETRO (Plants Engineered to Replace…