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Glo safety update – good news on DNA trials

DNA trialsReading Time: 5 minutes

Anti-nicotine zealots chose safety as their main battleground on e-cigarettes, and it didn’t work out too well for them. Now they seem to be doing the same again with Heat not Burn. Will it be more effective this time? Probably not.

We’ve already seen a lot of research from PMI on the safety of their iQOS heated tobacco device. Now British American Tobacco have released their own work on Glo, which is currently on sale in Japan and South Korea. Glo works on the same concept as iQOS, delivering vapour from heated tobacco that’s held in a cigarette-like stick, and the only real difference in the technology is that Glo heats its sticks to a lower temperature. That means we wouldn’t expect to see a huge difference in its vapour compared to iQOS – and, sure enough, we don’t.

Science and smoking

What BAT were interested in was the potential of Glo vapour to cause DNA changes in human cells. Damage to DNA can kill a cell – but, even worse, it can also cause cancer by making the cell grow and divide abnormally. Smoking is known to cause damage to thousands of genes; the question is, how does Glo compare?

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FDA vote is a setback – but not a disaster – for iQOS

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Yesterday was an important day for PMI’s iQOS heated tobacco device, and for the whole future of Heat not Burn in the USA. Following a long bureaucratic process an FDA advisory panel discussed, then voted on, PMI’s claim that iQOS is a Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP), a decision that could decide whether or not it goes on sale in the United States. It went better than it might have done, but unfortunately the results were still disappointing.

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PMI want to give up cigarettes – but not everyone’s happy

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In the last post we talked about New Year resolutions and how switching to heated tobacco might be one of yours. That turned out to be quite prophetic, because somebody else made a resolution that features HnB products, and they didn’t exactly keep it quiet either. That somebody was Philip Morris, the world’s largest and most successful tobacco company, and they announced their resolution with a series of full-page ads in major newspapers.

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