2023 Summer Publishing and Media Update
The summer has featured some new publications from IGTC staff as well as media coverage of some previous work.
A paper led by Senior Research Program Coordinator Graziele Grilo and Assistant Scientist Jennifer Brown titled “Shared perceptions of flavored cigarette pack design among young adult smokers in Mexico and the Philippines” provides evidence of similar strategies used by multinational tobacco companies in different parts of the world to attract youth to their addictive and deadly products—especially flavored cigarettes. A Spanish-language newspaper in Mexico, La Crónica de Hoy, published a news story based on these findings.
Dissemination of an IGTC study in Indonesia has resulted in news coverage by 18 in-country media outlets. Co-authors of the paper “Eugenol, menthol and other flavour chemicals in kreteks and ‘white’ cigarettes purchased in Indonesia,” Postdoctoral Fellow Beladenta Amalia and IGTC Director Joanna Cohen, were interviewed by Bahasa-language news sites Detik and Kompas about the varying levels of a wide range of flavor chemicals in Indonesia cigarettes.
Grilo and fellow Senior Research Program Coordinator Sejal Saraf each published an op-ed on previous work. Saraf wrote about the need to eliminate designated smoking areas in Bangladesh. Her article was published in English in the Dhaka Tribune and in Bangla in Janakantha, a leading Bengali daily newspaper.
Grilo co-authored an op-ed which was published in Brazilian newspaper O Globo. The article offered recommendations for tighter monitoring and enforcement of e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products in Brazil.
A paper led by Associate Scientist Lauren Czaplicki titled “Effects of cigarette price and packaging on hypothetical quit-smoking behaviour: a discrete choice experiment among Vietnamese adults who smoke” showed that price increases, larger health warning labels and plain packaging each could influence quit behaviors of Vietnamese adults who smoke. Tobacco Control published the paper.