HEADLINES

• BBC's guide to rolling cigarettes sparks medical row
• Patients win right to challenge hospital smoking ban
• Smoking around children can lead to future nicotine addiction
• Malawi: Tobacco poisons Malawi's children
• New Zealand: Electronic cigarettes safer than smokings says ministry
• Malaysia: Scandal of the chain-smoking orangutan
• Bill Tarmey to undergo heart surgery, but it hasn't stopped him smoking

• BBC's guide to rolling cigarettes sparks medical row

  Senior doctors have accused the BBC of being "breathtakingly irresponsible" and damaging public health by advising readers on its website how to make roll-up cigarettes.

  Dr Gabriel Scally, regional director of public health for south-west England, protested about an online article, entitled "how to roll a perfect cigarette". He wrote to Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, saying: "By allowing this type of content to be carried under a BBC logo gives an implied level of legitimacy for what is effectively a 'How 2' guide to shortening your life."

  
  Professor John Britton, chair of a tobacco advisory group at the Royal College of Physicians,  said: "The RCP believes it is breathtakingly irresponsible for the BBC to have information on their website on how to roll the perfect cigarette."

   

  Nick Reynolds, a social media executive at BBC Online, said the article would not be taken down. It is located on a part of the BBC website called H2G2, which is intended "to encourage the community to write about all aspects of human existence for a collaborative guide to life, the universe and everything" and the piece had been written by a member of the public, not a BBC journalist.
  Source: The Guardian, 06 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/lL5bob

• Patients win right to challenge hospital smoking ban

  Smokers at Chadwick Lodge hospital in Milton Keynes have been given permission to bring a test case over the hospital's smoking ban.

  Chadwick Lodge is a 52-bed medium-secure unit providing specialist treatment programmes for male and female patients who have been detained under the 1983 Mental Health Act and have a history of offending behaviour.  The ban on patients smoking, indoors or outdoors, was introduced last December. The patients say the ban infringes their common law right to smoke outdoors

  A Chadwick Lodge spokesman said: "The decision to make the hospital no smoking was born out of real initiatives hospital-wide to promote a healthy lifestyle for all patients."
  Source: The Guardian, 06 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/lrZfMa

• Smoking around children can lead to future nicotine addiction

  New research has shown that smoking around children can lead to future nicotine addiction.

  The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found that secondhand smoke has a direct and measurable impact on the brain similar to that of actually smoking. The findings reiterate previous research that suggests that exposure to secondhand smoke increases a child's chances of becoming a smoker later in life.

   

  Dr. Nora D. Volkow, NIDA director said: "These results show that even limited secondhand smoke exposure delivers enough nicotine to the brain to alter its function. Chronic or severe exposure could result in even higher brain nicotine levels, which may explain why secondhand smoke exposure increases vulnerability to nicotine addiction."

   

  "This study gives concrete evidence to support policies that ban smoking in public places, particularly enclosed spaces and around children."
  Source: Medical News Today, 06 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/lUjiGh

• Malawi: Tobacco poisons Malawi's children

  Nothing much has changed since the international child rights NGO Plan exposed in a 2009 report that tens of thousands of Malawi's child­ren work on tobacco farms. Malawi continues to have the highest number of child labourers in Southern Africa, with more than 78 000 children working on tobacco farms. Some of them are only five years old.

  The health risks are high. The handling of the leaves is done largely without protective clothing and the children absorb up to 54mg of dissolved nicotine through their skin - which is equal to smoking 50 cigarettes. As a result, many suffer from green tobacco sickness. The symptoms including severe headaches, abdominal pain, muscle weakness, coughing and breathlessness.

   

  The situation persists despite the fact that Malawi is a signatory to many United Nations and International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions aimed at limiting child labour. But what Malawi lacks most is a national child-labour policy. Although one has been drafted over the past two years, the government seems reluctant to pass it.

  
  "The legal framework is very weak and it could take years until the child labour policy is ratified," Tomoko Horii, a Unicef child protection programme officer, said.
   
  Source: Mail and Guardian Online (South Africa), 06 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/lWMdvh

• New Zealand: Electronic cigarettes safer than smokings says ministry

  The Ministry of Health in New Zealand has stated that electronic cigarettes are "far safer" than smoking tobacco.

  The statement to MPs has been welcomed by End Smoking trust chairman Dr Murray Laugesen, who is investigating e-cigarettes as a quit-smoking tool.

  
  E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that can deliver nicotine in a vapour mist, rather than in tobacco smoke. There is debate on whether they should be legally treated as a "recreational" product like tobacco, or as a medicine to help people quit smoking.

  
  The Ministry of Health told the health select committee: "As the e-cigarette delivers only nicotine ... without the 4000 or so other chemicals in tobacco smoke, it is far safer than smoking."

  
  However, the ministry said research questions needed to be answered before it could support the e-cigarette's introduction and trials were needed on its safety and its effectiveness as a quit-smoking device.
   
  Source: New Zealand Herald, 09 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/iWS83X

• Malaysia: Scandal of the chain-smoking orangutan

  Shirley the orangutan spends her days chain-smoking in her cramped enclosure, lighting the next cigarette from the stump of the last one.  Visitors chuck her their cigarette butts, blatantly ignoring the no smoking signs while zoo officials look the other way.

  Her plight is one of the most horrific examples of animals caged in cruelty in Malaysia, a country which has some of the worst zoos in the world.

   

  A law was passed last October to clean up zoos like these. But with only weeks to go before the June deadline, it is clear that rule is being ignored. Recent pictures show that Shirley is still getting hold of fags, despite barriers being erected by the zoo authorities.

  
  Nobody knows how she became addicted to cigarettes – she is even picky about which brands she smokes – but her keepers do little to stop visitors from feeding her habit.
  Source: Daily Mirror, 09 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/jgepLD

• Bill Tarmey to undergo heart surgery, but it hasn't stopped him smoking

  Coronation Street star Bill Tarmey has voiced his fear that he 'could be dead tomorrow,' and has revealed he is to undergo heart surgery in a matter of weeks, but  isn't letting his health problems get in the way of his smoking habit.

  The actor, who left the soap last year after 31 years, was pictured lighting up at the airport last week after arriving for a relaxing holiday in Tenerife, despite being wheeled to his waiting car in a wheelchair and using an oxygen mask.

  
  Bill, best known as Jack Duckworth on the long-running soap, was told recently that he must be fitted urgently with a new pacemaker after suffering dizzy spells and and fainting.

  
   
  Source: Daily Mail, 08 May 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/k3z3Gf