Global tobacco treaty leaders propose ejecting delegates with ties to industry

Reuters: The World Health Organization is about to get tough with the global tobacco industry.

Delegates at a conference next week on controlling tobacco with ties to the business could be refused credentials and ejected, according to an internal document seen by Reuters.

The proposal, if adopted by the full Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) at the conference in India, could affect delegates sent by countries like China and Vietnam, where governments own cigarette companies or promote tobacco growing and have in the past sent representatives linked to the industry.

Any such members of the 180 delegations at the November 7-12 conference near New Delhi ‘would be requested to leave the premises’, according to the October 17 ‘note verbale’, an official diplomatic communication, from the WHO FCTC secretariat on behalf of the treaty’s leadership group to its parties. 

At the last WHO FCTC conference, in Moscow in 2014, China’s 18-person delegation had four members from the ‘State Tobacco Monopoly Administration’.

At the 2012 conference, in Seoul, two of eight Vietnamese delegates were from the ‘Vietnam Tobacco Association’.

When asked about the letter, a Vietnamese government official who declined to be identified told Reuters there would be no industry representatives in their delegation.

China’s Ministry of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The proposed restriction highlights a growing battle between the industry and backers of the treaty, which went into effect in 2005 to guide national laws and policies in an effort to curb tobacco use, which kills an estimated 6 million people a year worldwide.

The global tobacco industry is estimated to be worth nearly $ 800 billion this year.

The International Tobacco Growers Association, a nonprofit group partly funded by big international cigarette companies, said the proposal was ‘beyond the wildest imagination’.

António Abrunhosa, chief executive of the group and a Portuguese tobacco grower, said in an email to Reuters that such a step was ‘unthinkable for a United Nations agency’.

John Stewart, deputy campaigns director at Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based advocacy group that has supported tobacco-control efforts, praised the proposed restrictions.

“The tobacco industry has really forced parties and the secretariat into a corner,” he said in an interview.

“This is a bold good-government action to ensure that the treaty space, the place where public health policies will save millions of lives, is free of tobacco industry intimidation.” Issues for debate at the conference include alternative livelihoods for tobacco farmers, e-cigarette regulation and trade and investment issues.

The secretariat earlier wrote to the treaty’s party nations asking them to exclude people with tobacco interests from their delegations.

In the latest note, the secretariat said it then turned to a FCTC leadership group for guidance after receiving a number of nominations from countries that ignored the suggestion.

Smoking a pack a day causes 150 mutations in every lung cell, research shows

Reuters: Scientists have found that smoking a pack a day of cigarettes can cause 150 damaging changes to a smoker’s lung cells each year.

The findings come from a study of the devastating genetic damage, or mutations, caused by smoking in various organs in the body.

Publishing in the journal Science on Thursday, the researchers said the findings show a direct link between the number of cigarettes smoked in a lifetime and the number of mutations in the DNA of cancerous tumours.

The highest mutation rates were seen in lung cancers, but tumours in other parts of the body – including the bladder, liver and throat – also had smoking-associated mutations, they said. This explains why smoking also causes many other types of cancer beside lung cancer.

Smoking kills six million people a year worldwide and, if current trends continue, the World Health Organisation predicts more than 1 billion tobacco-related deaths this century. Cancer is caused by mutations in the DNA of a cell. Smoking has been linked with at least 17 types of cancer, but until now scientists were not clear on the mechanisms behind many of them.

Ludmil Alexandrov of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, one of those who carried out the research, explained that in particular, it had until now been difficult to explain how smoking increases the risk of cancer in parts of the body that don’t come into direct contact with smoke.

“Before now, we had a large body of epidemiological evidence linking smoking with cancer, but now we can actually observe and quantify the molecular changes in the DNA,” he said.

This study analysed over 5,000 tumours, comparing cancers from smokers with those from people who had never smoked.

It found certain molecular fingerprints of DNA damage – called mutational signatures – in the smokers’ DNA, and the scientists counted how many of these were in different tumours.

In lung cells, they found that on average, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day led to 150 mutations in each cell every year. Each mutation is a potential start point for a “cascade of genetic damage” that can eventually lead to cancer, they said.

The results also showed that a smoking a pack of cigarettes a day led to an average 97 mutations in each cell in the larynx, 39 mutations for the pharynx, 23 for the mouth, 18 for the bladder, and six mutations in every cell of the liver each year.

Mike Stratton, who co-led the work at Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said it was a bit like digging in to the archaeology of each tumour.

“The genome of every cancer provides a kind of archaeological record, written in the DNA code itself, of the exposures that caused the mutations,” he said. “Looking in the DNA of cancers can provide provocative new clues to how (they) develop and thus, potentially, how they can be prevented.”