Public health advocate Clive Bates, founder of the influential blog The Counterfactual, joins Clearing the Air's Peter Beckett for a candid discussion on the current battles in the world of tobacco harm reduction.
Peter Beckett: Clive, welcome to Clearing the Air.…
Conflicts of interest, a pervasive bias and corruption at the heart of the European Commission’s tobacco and nicotine policy guidance document
In Part 1, we looked at how the European Commission tender for a Single Framework Contract for Support Actions in the Field…
The corruption behind the group providing policy guidance against tobacco harm reduction
Brussels has today received a report evaluating whether the EU needs to update its rules on tobacco and nicotine. Far from a dispassionate review of the evidence, what we have…
Around 125,000 additional people in England tried to quit smoking using vapes after the Government launched its “Swap to Stop” scheme, according to new research.
The study, carried out by researchers from the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Policy…
EU Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi has declared that new nicotine products such as vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches are “one hundred per cent” as harmful as traditional cigarettes.
Commissioner rejects harm reduction distinction
In an interview with Euractiv, Várhelyi was asked…
In part 2 of this conversation, Peter Beckett speaks with Dr Derek Yach, former Head of Tobacco Control at the World Health Organization and founding president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. They discuss the moment his thinking diverged from the…
Cigarette quit rates among vapers rose sharply between 2014 and 2021.
The increase was seen across all vape flavours - menthol, fruit, and mixed - except tobacco flavour.
Quit rates rose for every device type, from disposables to tanks and cartridges.
Younger…
As we count down to the WHO’s bi-annual summit on tobacco control - which is increasingly used to spread misinformation about harm reduction, we sat down with former WHO Director for Non-Communicable Diseases Derek Yach. Derek’s had a long and fascinating career…
Arielle Selya is a former academic turned consultant. She set out to prove that the “gateway hypothesis” - that vaping leads to smoking in young people - was real, but ended up disproving it. When many of her peers refused to listen…
