Heated tobacco products (HTPs) contain nicotine and other carcinogens, and can be as addictive and harmful to the body as regular cigarettes, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said on Thursday.
The agency issued a warning about the health effects of using HTPs the day after the US Food and Drug Administration announced that tobacco giant Philip Morris could market a tobacco heating system — an electronic device that heats tobacco-filled sticks wrapped in paper to generate a nicotine-containing aerosol.
“Smoking cigarettes does nothing but harm the body, and new types of products — e-cigarettes and HTPs — are the same,” the HPA said.
Citing the WHO’s information sheet on HTPs, the agency said that “there is no evidence to demonstrate that HTPs are less harmful than conventional tobacco products.”
HTPs contain nicotine, which induces the release of dopamine in the brain and is highly addictive, as users need more nicotine with repeated use, it added.
The products also contain tar, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and other toxic or cancer-causing substances, the agency said, citing a 2017 Japanese study.
The new products might attract more young people to smoking, Tobacco Control Division head Lo Su-ying (羅素英) said.
A survey of 16-to-19-year-olds in the US, Canada and the UK found that 29.1 percent of respondents wanted to try e-cigarettes and 25.1 percent wanted to try heated tobacco products — higher than the 19.3 percent who wanted to try regular cigarettes, she said.
The agency urges people to avoid substances that are addictive and contain many unknown ingredients, Lo said.
Some countries have approved the use of HTPs, but Taiwan has so far not approved their use, so heated tobacco products cannot be imported either, Lo said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching