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In Norse mythology, an Elf is a rather friendly supernatural creature, also present in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. But a much more real and dangerous ELF is circulating among us! Of all the disposable electronic cigarettes that invade our schools and whose marketing specifically targets adolescents, one brand is particularly worrisome: the ELFBAR brand. The market for disposables is changing very quickly and new brands and models are constantly coming onto the market. ELFBAR dominates the Swiss market today, and seems to have dethroned the initial Puff Bar brand. But is an ELFBAR better than other disposables? This by far doesn’t seem to be the case and we will try to gather the most recent information on these products here.

Report: The impact of cigarette filters on public health and the Belgian environment

A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine investigated the incidence of peripheral artery disease (PAD) among users of smokeless tobacco products. The findings show that the use of chewing tobacco and snuff is associated with a two-fold increase in the risk for PAD.

We are very pleased that AT Switzerland has been chosen as a charity partner for this year's Swiss Women's Run, which will take place on 11 June 2023 in Bern! We invite all members to participate and offer a limited number of free starts.

One out of every three 15-year-olds had used at least one tobacco or nicotine product in the 30 days preceding the survey, most often in the form of electronic cigarettes. Mandated by the Federal Office of Public Heath, Addiction Suisse conducted an HBSC (Health Behaviour in School-aged Children) study last year using a representative sample of 11- to 15-year-olds nationwide.

New STOP report provides a compelling overview summary of the six tobacco industry pricing strategies that undermine life-saving tobacco taxes.

The primary prevention of tobacco use among children and adolescents is both the cornerstone and the “Achilles heel” of tobacco control policy. For the tobacco industry, this age group is the territory where it can "effortlessly" hunt for new prey. Multinational tobacco companies are thus compensating for a decline in activity due to tobacco-related deaths (8 million per year worldwide) or people who have stopped smoking.

We are very pleased that AT Switzerland has been chosen as a charity partner for this year's Swiss Women's Run, which will take place on 11 June 2023 in Bern! We look forward to working with the Women's Run team to make a positive contribution. Let's come together to get things moving and join the race!

Experts state that disposable electronic cigarettes, often referred to as “puff bars”, should be banned. If a ban is not possible, certain aspects should be strictly regulated: taxation, product composition and marketing, restrictions on sale and consumption. These regulations should go further than the current EU directive and the future Swiss law. The findings will be useful to support and guide policy-making from a public health and environmental perspective.

Electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes have become popular because they are promoted as a "healthier alternative" to smoking. This hypothesis was recently refuted by the FDA.

The UN's Sustainable Development Goal 16 aims to promote peaceful, inclusive, and just societies, underpinned by effective and accountable institutions. However, by acting to defend its interests, the tobacco industry jeopardises the achievement of these objectives.

A recently launched European Citizens' Initiative aims to create a tobacco-free environment and Europe’s first tobacco-free generation by 2030. To do this, one million signatures must be collected between 16 January 2023 and 16 January 2024. AT Suisse supports the goal of this project and calls on EU citizens living in Switzerland to sign it.

The canton of Jura recently introduced this measure and the Vaud government has come out in favour of banning the sale of disposable electronic cigarettes, known as "puff bars", to minors. Such a provision already exists in many other French-speaking cantons. At the national level, we still have to wait for the new Tobacco Products Act (TPA) to enter into force, unfortunately!

New Zealand last December passed into law a unique plan to phase out tobacco smoking and reach a smoke-free generation.

The nicotine and tobacco industries are adapting manipulative tactics that they used for cigarettes to market their nicotine pouch products. In this article we propose to show how the argument of harm reduction is used in a context that can only serve tobacco industry interests and that goes against public health.

From the 5-6 December 2022, the French National Cancer Institute (INCa) organised an international scientific conference on e-cigarettes

The fifteenth Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations is devoted to the protection and restauration of land habitats. This involves sustainable forest management, as well as measures to combat desertification, soil depletion, and the loss of biodiversity. But tobacco farms are particularly harmful to land ecosystems.

New report exposes how the tobacco industry exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to increase its profits at the detriment of public health.

Smoking has a direct impact on the health of waterways and seas, as well as that of aquatic life. Find out more in our latest article.

In the Netherlands, there has been significant increase of smoke-free environments, mostly at schoolyards, playgrounds, sports facilities, bus stops and municipal institutions. In the municipalities of Utrecht and Nieuwegein for example, 831 bus stops are now smoke-free.

China has banned the sale of flavoured e-cigarettes. The new rules mean e-cigarettes that have flavourings other than tobacco – such as fruity or menthol flavourings – cannot be sold on the domestic market.

The tobacco industry doesn't typically come to mind as an environmental steward, but the tobacco industry has historically greenwashed its reputation and products through programs on the global level.

ENDS are highly heterogeneous products that consist of a mouthpiece, a tank or a cartridge for e-liquid, a battery, and an atomizer, which affects the performance, the inhalation of aerosol, as well as nicotine delivery. In consideration of their easily accessible and easy-to-use nature, ENDS are raising public health concerns, as youth consumption rates are increasing.

Recent studies demonstrate that the consumption of cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and cannabis are interrelated. In consideration of the developments towards cannabis legalisation in Switzerland, this calls for a well-developed policy environment for cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and cannabis.

The 13th Sustainable Development Objective of the United Nations calls for taking urgent measures to combat climate change. However, the tobacco industry represents a major source of greenhouse gases and pollution.

A new study published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health aiming to track teenagers’ knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours about using e-cigarettes found teenagers are readily accessing flavoured, disposable vaping products.

The twelfth Sustainable Development Objective of the United Nations aims to establish sustainable modes of consumption and production. However, the way the tobacco industry functions is in flagrant contradiction to these objectives.

Data on prevalence, consumption patterns among young people, figures on exposure to passive smoking, or mortality – AT Switzerland is offering for the first time an overview of the available monitoring data on tobacco and nicotine consumption in Switzerland, located in the “Data & figures” section of our website.

RTS has respected the rules in conducting its interview with Philip Morris, whose complaint to the Swiss Press Council was rejected. RTS has won the case against the carcinogenic products retailer in the programme, "Mise au point", and can continue to do transparent and independent journalism.

Puff bars are the new electronic cigarettes that are all the rage among teenagers. Praised on social networks, these disposable devices have a dazzling success among the youth in French speaking Switzerland.

A new study led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows that chemicals lingering in indoor spaces where smoking took place can put whole households at risk. Researchers found that the concentrations of toxic chemicals that linger indoors after cigarettes have been smoked can result in exposure that exceeds health guidelines established by the State of California.

Since their arrival, disposable electronic cigarettes have been completely changing the nicotine consumption market and their sales are growing exponentially: the increase in sales could reach 2,200% in 2022! The consumption of these products by young people continues to spread massively in an invisible and dangerous way. Not only is our legal framework completely behind the times, but our public health policies are totally inadequate to deal with these very rapid developments.

Cities must be inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable; this is the goal of the eleventh Sustainable Development Objective of the United Nations. However, smoking imperils the realisation of this goal on several fronts.

A new study by Faselis et al. (2022), has highlighted the unmet need in lung cancer screening, as their research has shown that a 10-fold high lung cancer risk has been found among light and former heavy smokers for whom computer tomography (CT) scan screening is not recommended.[i]

Who keeps telling smokers they can’t quit without help? For decades there have been far more ex-smokers than smokers, and an estimated 75% of smokers quit without drugs or professional help.

Snus is a smokeless tobacco product that has gained popularity among youth. Snus produces a similar nicotine dependence to smoking and has no advantages over cigarettes or other electronic nicotine delivery products, due to the risk of inducing, maintaining, and reinforcing combustible cigarette consumption, as well as major risks to oral health.

Flavoured Puff Bars are worsening the youth vaping epidemic and are currently flooding the Swiss market.

Puff bars: they are new, very strong in dosage, allow hidden consumption and are becoming increasingly popular among young people precisely for these reasons. AT Switzerland has now identified new products of these disposable electronic cigarettes whose nicotine content violates legal regulations and which can also be easily ordered via the Internet without age checks. This is a worrying trend. AT Switzerland is therefore sounding an alert to the federal authorities.

At the heart of the United Nations' eighth Sustainable Development Goal is the promotion of sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth and decent work for all. The tobacco industry employs about 100 million people worldwide; however, most of these jobs are not dream jobs.

The 7th UN Sustainable Development Goal calls for universal access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy services. The tobacco industry challenges the achievement of this goal in several ways.

Truth Initiative’s recently published report looking at tobacco imagery in entertainment, “While You Were Streaming: Nicotine on Demand,” finds that as young people watched more video content than ever before in 2020, pervasive smoking and vaping imagery lit up their screens.

Tobacco's influence extends to many sectors of society and threatens the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Read our latest post on how the production, consumption and disposal of tobacco and nicotine products threatens and pollutes our waters.

In cooperation with Medicus Mundi Switzerland (MMS), the leading network of international health cooperation and global health, AT Switzerland addresses in an online bulletin the crimes of the tobacco industry in the global South and why they endanger the goals of the 2030 Agenda.

In a new policy brief, the World Heart Federation (WHF) is calling on governments to introduce stricter regulations on e-cigarettes and greater oversight of marketing and sales strategies to stop the e-cigarette epidemic.

Tobacco's influence impacts many areas of society and threatens the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Read our latest post on how tobacco threatens gender equality.

""Vaping: The real dollars behind fake consumer organisations" is a newly-published investigation by “Le Monde” and “The Investigative Desk” (Netherlands) that reveals the alliance between the tobacco lobby and the networks of American oil tycoons to prevent regulations on electronic cigarettes.

Switzerland comes in an inglorious 79th place (out of 80) in the new 2021 Tobacco Lobby Index, only just ahead of the Dominican Republic. Once again it becomes clear: the tobacco industry interferes massively in Swiss politics in order to be able to freely market and sell its deadly and harmful products.

New analyses from Australia and the USA show that there are countless chemical components in e-liquids and e-vapour, some of which are of concern. They thus confirm older analyses and point to possible further problematic substances. They also make it clear that most of the existing chemical components have not yet been identified and their hazard potential is unknown.

The right to quality education is at the heart of the UN's fourth sustainable development goal. Yet tobacco use puts its achievement at risk. Read more in our new contribution to our series of articles!

Now it is clear: With the weak Tobacco Products Act, Switzerland will have the weakest rules for tobacco advertising in Europe. Ratification of the WHO Framework Convention (FCTC) is thus made impossible, as Federal Councillor Alain Berset emphasised.

Many forget that tobacco plays a crucial role in tackling climate change and the future of agriculture and food security. Currently, tobacco is grown in over 125 countries as a cash crop, over an estimated area of 4 million hectares.

The Swiss Parliament will debate the Tobacco Products Act this week. In an interview with Le Temps, our director Luciano Ruggia explains how politicians play into the hands of the tobacco lobby and do not consider tobacco as a public health problem.

Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death and disease worldwide. Read more in our new contribution to our series of articles!

The Devil’s Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of A New Generation

On 26 August 2021, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) announced a ban on the sale of more than 55 000 flavoured electronic cigarette products because they pose a health risk to young people. In Switzerland, all of these products are freely available without any control regarding their chemical content, without any government restriction on sales to minors and without any taxation.

In a new article in the Schweizerische Ärztezeitung (SÄZ), Luciano Ruggia, Managing Director of AT Switzerland, sheds light on the variety of new tobacco and nicotine products and their consequences for young people and public health in Switzerland.

Taxing tobacco products is the most effective means of controlling tobacco use, so the tobacco industry uses a range of sophisticated pricing strategies to undermine the preventive effect of tax increases.

The canton of Valais extends the protection against second-hand smoke and the ban on advertising tobacco products. Four questions to Alexandre Dubuis of Promotion santé Valais regarding the new ordinance, which came into force on 1 July 2021.

The Swiss Association for Tobacco Control has a new appearance. Alongside the modernisation of the logo, the focus is also on the newly designed website. This new corporate design strengthens the positioning of AT Switzerland.