notabouthealth

Please, Can We Have Some More?

Now that we’re into the 11th year of the most spiteful and damaging social engineering exercise England has ever seen – otherwise known as the smoking ban – I found myself rather bemused by how innocuous the anniversary was.

I wrote about the impending anniversary ahead of time, planning to write another piece on the day; but as these things go, that never happened. It was unsurprising to see the usual cobblers being spouted by various social media accounts using the hashtag #smokefree10.

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First they came for..

Well this is a rather lovely to-do isn’t it?

The smoking ban. Introduced on July 1st 2007 (in England, but the Scots had to go one better and implement it officially on March 26th 2006. Plus Wales did it on April 2nd 2007 – if only it had been a day earlier – and Northern Ireland on April 20th 2007). The ban is now almost 10 years old.

For those that don’t remember how it all came about, a brief history lesson is needed.

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Again the EU is told No

Regular readers will of course remember fondly that the EU held another “public consultation” recently, with the closing date of last month. This so-called public consultation was all about the taxation of manufactured tobacco products. Of course, being the EU and with the shiny new Tobacco Products Directive it just had to include the humble e-cigarette, despite (of course) neither the devices themselves, nor the liquid refills containing any actual manufactured tobacco at all – natch.

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Denial of the Echo Chamber

One of the many reasons I have a blog is so that I can spout, mostly nonsense, into the ether my thoughts on a particular topic that piques my interest. Most of the posts on these pages cover the various bits of “science” – mostly bad science – that grab sensationalist headlines, that do nothing more than to confuse a highly nuanced subject. Most of the time I am fairly factual, though quite often I will, quite frankly, take the piss.

It’s cathartic.

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The Game is Afoot

You may have noticed that I’ve been talking about Snus a bit recently. It appears that I’m not the only one. Now, if you do a search on Aunty Beeb for mention of Snus, you won’t find very much from the last twelve months. In fact before the most recent (junk) article, the last time Aunty Beeb mentions Snus in an article dates back to May 2015 when there was quite a bit of a to do about a certain EU official and a teeny bit of bribery.

EU anti-fraud agency Olaf had earlier delivered a report asserting that Mr Dalli had held unauthorised secret meetings with tobacco industry representatives.

Secret meetings? With an EU Official? Those never happen do they!

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E-Cigs and ‘dripping’: What Science isn’t Saying

There’s a new study doing the rounds at the moment. Well, I say “study” but it isn’t really. It’s yet another survey, with participants selected from eight southeastern Connecticut high schools from spring 2015. “This study is the first systematic evaluation of the use of dripping among teens,” says the lead author Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

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