Consumer Perceptions of Cigarette Design in France: A Comparison of Regular, Slim, Pink and Plain Cigarettes

Introduction The cigarette, like the cigarette pack, is used by tobacco companies as a promotional tool. We explore how the cigarette could potentially be used as a dissuasive tool. Methods An online survey was conducted with 15-30 year old smokers and non-smokers (N=998) in France to explore their perceptions of a plain cigarette (grey with no brand name) and three branded cigarettes (regular, slim, pink). Participants were randomly assigned to view the plain cigarette and either the regular, slim or pink cigarette. They were asked to rate the cigarettes by Appeal (tastiest, highest quality, most expensive), Harm (most dangerous, most effective for motivating people to talk about tobacco dangers), and Perceived behavioral impact (most effective to convince teenagers not to start, to motivate smokers to reduce consumption and quit). Results In comparison to the grey cigarette, each of the branded cigarettes were considered more appealing, less harmful, and more likely to motivate teenagers to start and less likely to motivate smokers to reduce consumption or quit. Conclusions The study suggests that altering the appearance of the cigarette may reduce cigarette appeal, increase harm perceptions, and deter both young people and smokers. Implications Very little research has focused on dissuasive cigarettes whereas the cigarette stick has become very important for tobacco companies for communication purposes. This is the first study to compare the effect of various branded cigarettes (regular, slim, pink) with a plain grey cigarette on young adult smokers and non-smokers. The findings suggest that a plain grey cigarette can reduce cigarette appeal, increase perceptions of harm, and may deter use among both smokers and non-smokers

Risk Factors Associated with Unsafe Injection Practices at the First Injection Episode among Intravenous Drug Users in France: Results from PrimInject, an Internet Survey

Background. New drug use patterns may increase the risk of human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis infections. In France, new injection patterns among youths with diverse social backgrounds have emerged, which may explain the persistently high rates of hepatitis C virus infection. This study explores factors associated with injection risk behaviours at first injection among users who began injecting in the post-2000 era. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted on the Internet from October 2010 to March 2011, through an online questionnaire. Multivariate logistic regression identified the independent correlates of needle sharing and equipment (cooker/cotton filter) sharing. Results. Among the 262 respondents (mean age 25 years), 65% were male. Both risk behaviours were positively associated with initiation before 18 years of age (aOR 3.7 CI 95% 1.3-10.6 and aOR 3.0 CI 95% 1.3-7.0) and being injected by another person (aOR 3.1 CI 95% 1.0-9.9 and aOR 3.0 CI 95% 1.3-7.1). Initiation at a party was an independent correlate of equipment sharing (aOR 2.6 95% CI 1.0-6.8). Conclusions. Results suggest a need for innovative harm reduction programmes targeting a variety of settings and populations, including youths and diverse party scenes. Education of current injectors to protect both themselves and those they might initiate into injection is critically important

Improving taste and flavor in dairy product through milk analysis of free fatty by mid-infrared (MIR) spectrometry

editorial reviewe

Tobacco endgame measures and their adaptation in selected European countries: A narrative review synthesis

Due to the continued detrimental effects of tobacco use, a growing number of countries are embracing the idea of tobacco endgame, meaning ending the tobacco epidemic instead of controlling it. This narrative review aims to synthesize and update the evidence from earlier scientific reviews on effective tobacco endgame measures, as well as to assess their integration to current national strategies among European countries with official tobacco endgame goals. The synthesis of the prior scientific literature found most evidence on product-focused and some evidence for supply-focused policies. Little evidence was detected for user- and institutionalfocused measures. An update for the tobacco-free generation measure showed uncertainty in reducing smoking prevalence, especially for adolescents' reactions to age-restrictive laws. All the countries that established a tobacco endgame strategy have included product standards in their measures, predominantly based on European Union regulations on conventional tobacco products, yet standards above this level and considering other products were also common. Cessation measures were given strong emphasis in strategies, yet none of the countries linked these to specific endgame measures. Despite commonly mentioning vulnerable groups, such as youth and pregnant women, adoption of measures to reduce tobacco use among these groups was scarce. Lastly, the decline in tobacco use seems to be modest, implying challenges in meeting the endgame goals. To meet these goals, European countries should reinforce the implementation of known effective tobacco control measures such as tax increases. Furthermore, new innovative strategies and measures to meet the objective of an endgame should be explored

Time perspective as a predictor of smoking status: findings from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Surveys in Scotland, France, Germany, China, and Malaysia

BACKGROUND: Prior studies have demonstrated that time perspective-the propensity to consider short-versus long-term consequences of one\u27s actions-is a potentially important predictor of health-related behaviors, including smoking. However, most prior studies have been conducted within single high-income countries. The aim of this study was to examine whether time perspective was associated with the likelihood of being a smoker or non-smoker across five countries that vary in smoking behavior and strength of tobacco control policies. METHODS: The data were from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Surveys in five countries with large probability samples of both smokers (N=10,341) and non-smokers (N=4,955): Scotland, France, Germany, China, and Malaysia. The surveys were conducted between 2005-2008. Survey respondents indicated their smoking status (smoker vs. non-smoker) and time perspective (future oriented vs. not future-oriented) and provided demographic information. RESULTS: Across all five countries, non-smokers were significantly more likely to be future-oriented (66%) than were smokers (57%), χ(2)(1, N = 15,244) = 120.64, p < .001. This bivariate relationship between time perspective and smoking status held in a multivariate analysis. After controlling for country, age, sex, income, education, and ethnicity (language in France), those who were future-oriented had 36% greater odds of being a non-smoker than a smoker (95% CI: 1.22 to 1.51, p<.001). CONCLUSION: These findings establish time perspective as an important predictor of smoking status across multiple countries and suggest the potential value of incorporating material to enhance future orientation in smoking cessation interventions

Tobacco endgame in the WHO European Region: Feasibility in light of current tobacco control status

INTRODUCTION To assess the feasibility of developing World Health Organization (WHO) European Region countries' goals and measures in line with tobacco endgame objectives, information on the current tobacco control context and capacity is needed. The aim of this study was to assess the implementation of measures in the region. METHODS In this cross-sectional study we used data from the WHO FCTC implementation reports and MPOWER from 2020 in 53 WHO European Region countries. Six domains (i.e. capacity, taxation and price policies, other national key regulations, public awareness raising and communication, tobacco use cessation, and monitoring) were formed. Subsequently, available indicators under these domains were scored and the level of implementation was computed for each country. Mann-Whitney tests were carried out to compare the scores between the group of countries with and without official endgame goals. RESULTS Overall, implementation of the WHO FCTC with the selected indicators at the country level ranged from 28% to 86%, and of MPOWER from 31% to 96%. Full implementation was achieved by 28% of WHO FCTC Parties in the region in taxation and price policies, 12% in public awareness raising and communication, CONCLUSIONS There is unequal implementation of both WHO FCTC and MPOWER measures among WHO European Region countries. MPOWER and WHO FCTC provide all the measures for the necessary first steps, followed by innovativ

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Poppers

Le poppers est le nom usuel donné aux nitrites d’alkyles. Ils sont utilisés pour intensifier l’expérience sexuelle ou pour les courtes euphories qu’ils provoquent juste après l’inhalation du produit. Malgré les différentes périodes d’interdiction, le poppers est resté banalisé au cours des années 2000 et son usage a même connu une hausse importante entre 2000 et 2010. En population adulte comme adolescente, il s’agit du deuxième produit consommé après le cannabis parmi les drogues illicites, confirmant qu’il concerne des milieux bien plus larges que les milieux gays et lesbiens qui sont parfois présentés comme emblématiques de leur consommation. L’expérimentation du poppers concerne 5,3 % des 18-64 ans en 2010, en particulier les hommes (7,2 % contre 3,4 % pour les femmes). À la fin de l’adolescence, elle concerne 8,8 % des filles et 9,2 % des garçons. Les poppers bénéficient dans la population générale, en particulier celle des jeunes, d’une image globalement positive. Pourtant, ce produit n’est pas dénué de danger, même si le risque de dépendance est particulièrement faible. Quelques pistes d’actions peuvent être esquissées, un travail d’information et de suivi régulier auprès des usagers pouvant permettre d’éviter une radicalisation de la consommation parmi les usagers réguliers

Risk Factors Associated with Unsafe Injection Practices at the First Injection Episode among Intravenous Drug Users in France: Results from PrimInject, an Internet Survey

Background. New drug use patterns may increase the risk of human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis infections. In France, new injection patterns among youths with diverse social backgrounds have emerged, which may explain the persistently high rates of hepatitis C virus infection. This study explores factors associated with injection risk behaviours at first injection among users who began injecting in the post-2000 era. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted on the Internet from October 2010 to March 2011, through an online questionnaire. Multivariate logistic regression identified the independent correlates of needle sharing and equipment (cooker/cotton filter) sharing. Results. Among the 262 respondents (mean age 25 years), 65% were male. Both risk behaviours were positively associated with initiation before 18 years of age (aOR 3.7 CI 95% 1.3–10.6 and aOR 3.0 CI 95% 1.3–7.0) and being injected by another person (aOR 3.1 CI 95% 1.0–9.9 and aOR 3.0 CI 95% 1.3–7.1). Initiation at a party was an independent correlate of equipment sharing (aOR 2.6 95% CI 1.0–6.8). Conclusions. Results suggest a need for innovative harm reduction programmes targeting a variety of settings and populations, including youths and diverse party scenes. Education of current injectors to protect both themselves and those they might initiate into injection is critically important

Méthodologie d'enquête

La France s'est dotée en juin 2004 d'un premier Plan national Santé environnement (PNSE).Dans ce cadre, l'INPES a été mandaté pour mettre en œuvre une enquête permettant de disposer au stade initial de la mise en œuvre du plan d'indicateurs quantifiés sur les attitudes, opinions et comportements de la population. appréhende les perceptions, attitudes et comportements de la population de métropole face à la perception des risques liés la pollution des sols, la pollution atmosphérique, la pollution de l'air intérieur, l'utilisation des produits ménagers, de bricolage, de jardinage, les risques d'intoxication au monoxyde de carbone ou ceux liés au radon, la perception des risques liés à l'eau, aux légionelles, au bruit ou à la téléphonie mobile. Le baromètre santé environnement a été conçu sur le modèle des Baromètres santé téléphoniques initiés par l'INPES en 1992. Il repose sur un échantillon aléatoire de 6007 personnes âgées de 18 à 75 ans, incluant les listes rouges