Most readers of this blog will know that, while I’m a user and huge fan of Heat not Burn products, I’m mainly a vaper. When I quit smoking I used an early e-cig starter kit, and I’ve now been vaping for more than five years. In that time I’ve used a lot of different e-cigs, learned to make my own coils and e-liquids, and written thousands of words to advocate for vaping. I go to pro-vaping conferences and know most of the UK’s prominent vaping advocates. Vaping is a thing that I do.
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.
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?
Continue reading Glo safety update – good news on DNA trials
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.
Continue reading FDA vote is a setback – but not a disaster – for iQOS
