Email
Password
(Forgot Password?)
PFIZER Malaysia recently launched its new smoking cessation pill, varenicline, a breakthrough non-nicotine oral medication. It has a novel mechanism of action which helps smokers quit smoking by providing dual benefits.
Varenicline is unique because it is specifically designed to partially activate the nicotinic receptor and reduce the severity of the smoker's craving and the withdrawal symptoms from nicotine.
Jump to full article »
the city's municipal government is also making efforts to ensure a healthy Games by prohibiting smoking in public areas.
The regulation was enacted to meet requirements from the World Health Organization (WHO).
In a 2004 meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing, former WHO Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook said it was his hope that all athletes and spectators coming to the Beijing Games have a smoke-free environment at the competition venues.
Premier Wen agreed, noting that a smoking-free Olympic Games is in line with the Olympic spirit, and would further enhance tobacco control in Beijing.
Health authorities in Beijing banned smoking in public areas beginning on May 1. . . .
To meet the regulation, a total of 6,700 no smoking signs were place at all Olympic sports venues.
To create a smoke-free dining environment, the Beijing Health Bureau and other organizations issued a regulation requiring no-smoking areas in the city's 40,000 restaurants in February 2007. . . .
Another no-smoking campaign requires medical organizations to take the lead to turn hospitals into a no-smoking environment, then promote the initiative to all of society.
The Beijing Health Bureau has formulated six standards for smoke-free hospitals. . . .
From April to June in 2008, a total of 165 reports on smoking control appeared in the news media.
Posters to promote tobacco control were placed in many communities in Beijing. . . .
The Beijing Health Bureau has also strengthened cooperation with WHO and other international organizations to enhance the tobacco control task in the city.
The NHS has spent £3.7 million on helping West smokers who were unsuccessful in their attempts to kick the habit following the introduction of the public ban last summer.
The first statistics on smokers since the public smoking ban came into force in England in July last year showed that in the past year, 53 per cent of the 61,962 people in the South West who tried to give up smoking, actually succeeded. In the year before the ban, 55 per cent of the 55,110 who tried to kick the habit successfully quit.
NHS South West spent £129.20 per smoker helping them to try to give up last year, amounting to a spend of £4.2m on those who were successful.
But it means £3.7m was spent on people who did not manage to stop smoking.
In the Bath area, advisers had a 64 per cent success rate
Some of the world's biggest tobacco firms researched the lethal radioactive substance polonium - present in cigarettes - over a 40-year period but never published the results, according to a new scientific article.
Experts have examined more than 1,500 internal documents from tobacco companies.
Polonium 210 is known to cause lung cancers in animals and studies suggest it is responsible for 1 per cent of all lung cancers - equivalent to 11,700 deaths globally - each year in the US.
It is also the substance that poisoned the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Yet tobacco companies, while attempting but failing to remove the substance from their products, have kept quiet about their research, experts say.
One of the documents - all of which were made public through legal actions - said publication would be "waking a sleeping giant". The authors of the article, published in the September edition of American Journal of Public Health, also say tobacco companies feared possible litigation.
The World Health Organisation is trying to determine which constituents of tobacco smoke are most important in diseases including lung cancer, but as yet have not concluded polonium 210 is a priority constituent.Unidentified spokeswoman for British American Tobacco.
[Publication of the tobacco industry's polonium 210 research] has the potential to wake a sleeping giant.Unidentified 1978 tobacco industry internal document.
A motorbike lays a dense cloud of smoke on me as I jump on a bus. I sit down with the pounding headache I always get when I inhale someone else's cigarette smoke. Wait, that's exactly what I'm doing, thanks to the 10 people, virtually sitting on my lap, who are smoking.
Clean Air Manhattan chairman Stan Watt is forecasting a 3-2 verdict — one way or the other —by the Manhattan City Commission in regard to the proposed amendment to the city's smoking ordinance.
A group of campaigners from the world anti-smoking coalition has arrived in the country to partner the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and the media to push the tobacco free agenda forward.
The objective of the group is to advocate the passage of the National Tobacco Control Bill in Ghana to give meaning to the ratification of the tobacco control treaty introduced by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2003.
AN elderly woman caught in a fire was given protection against the smoke by an oxygen mask.
The woman is believed to have accidentally started the blaze after she dropped a cigarette in the bedroom of her bungalow in Jura Avenue, Ripley.
A spokesman for Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service said she had been inhaling oxygen from a portable machine when the fire started, due to a pre-existing medical condition.
He said: "We believe she dropped the cigarette and luckily had moved into the lounge when the fire started.
"She was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation but fortunately was wearing an oxygen mask, so wasn't too bad."
‘There may be more famous surgeons general, but there was none more dedicated, tenacious or courageous’
Julius Richmond, who has died aged 91, was the US surgeon general who first warned the Carter administration that cigarette smoking was “slow-motion suicide”.
A pioneer of a vigorous anti-smoking campaign, he produced a report three decades ago citing “overwhelming proof” that tobacco causes lung cancer. . . .
Richmond’s 1979 report on the health risks of smoking persuaded congress to require new labels on cigarette packets stating “Surgeon General’s Warning” and outlining specific health risks related to smoking. He formally retired in 1988 but continued to research and write about the effects of smoking and he served as a key witness in legal actions against the tobacco industry. “We are in the midst of the largest man-made epidemic in history,” he declared.
A group of journalists say they have an answer. You hire them to investigate and write about what they find.
The idea, which they are calling "community-funded journalism," is now being tested in the San Francisco Bay area, where a new nonprofit, Spot Us, is using its Web site, spot.us, to solicit ideas for investigative articles and the money to pay for the reporting. But the experiment has also raised concerns of journalism being bought by the highest bidder. . . .
Critics say the idea of using crowdfunding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking? (Spot Us limits the amount any one contributor can give to no more than 20 percent of the cost of the story.)
I am a law-abiding citizen who has lived and worked in Madison County all my life. I have never been in any trouble, and I obey the law. I feel my rights and liberties are about to be taken from me. I must speak out in behalf of all smokers in Madison County who are also law-abiding citizens. I've always respected those who don't smoke. . . .
Now, a lot of non-smokers are pushing for a complete smoking ban in Anderson. Establishments are going non-smoking. All those who smoke need to stand together and never again eat at those establishments. I will not patronize a place that forbids smoking.
Car emissions are polluting the air we breathe . . .
When Anderson City Council's Health Committee discusses the smoking ban ordinance it will present to the council next month, it will have to take several opinions into account.
Since the committee presented a draft of the ordinance to the council in June, two camps have broken off in not supporting the act, which would ban smoking in public places in Anderson. One, consisting of Anderson advocacy group Healthy, Tobacco-Free Madison County, Saint John's Health System and Community Hospital, has expressed concerns with the ordinance because it said it wasn't comprehensive enough and offered too many exemptions.
A more recent group, represented by concerned resident Al Faunce, doesn't believe the ordinance is necessary because Faunce said his research shows that secondhand smoke is not dangerous. . . .
At Thursday's City Council meeting, Faunce presented information he researched that he said suggested no one has ever been documented of dying from secondhand smoke . . .
Faunce also presented a petition to the council with 2,139 names of community members against a smoking ban. . . .
Faunce, a non-smoker, researched the effects of secondhand smoke when he started hearing agencies claim it caused death.
"I'm not one to just accept something at face value," he said. "I have been around the block enough to know you don't believe everything you hear."
Faunce used studies from prominent doctors, such as Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, and Dr. Richard Doll, who first linked active smoking to lung cancer. Both said the secondhand smoke's effects are minimal and have not been known to cause death or lung cancer, Faunce said.