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Lyttelton health researcher
Dr Murray Laugesen is involved in safety tests of the product - which has
a glowing tip to emulate real cigarettes - for the China-based company
that makes it.
He said the company would decide after the safety
tests and a clinical trial in Auckland
early next year whether to apply to sell it in New
Zealand. The ministry had ruled it
would need to be registered as a medicine first.
The Ruyan e-cigarette device
is available on-line for US$208 ($270) - the price of about 22 packets
of Holiday 25s - and the nicotine inserts cost
around $2 a day.
Auckland University's
clinical trials research unit will next year test the device, with
funding from the maker, to see how quickly it delivers nicotine into
the smoker's bloodstream and whether it reduces cigarette cravings and
withdrawal symptoms. It will be compared with a nicotine inhaler and
placebo versions of both devices.
The Ministry of Health has confirmed that using the
device would not breach the Smokefree
Environ-ments Act, which extended workplace
smoking bans.
Researchers hope in future to test the e-cigarette's
effectiveness in helping to quit smoking, but it is also recognised some people might use it long-term as a
tobacco replacement. "It may have a role for a small number of
people who want to continue to be addicted," said the research
unit's associate director, Dr Chris Bullen.
"This is a way of making it much less harmful than inhaling the
byproducts of
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Smokers can puff legally at indoor bars and
cafes with a battery-powered "electronic cigarette" because
its nicotine hit comes in a vapour.
[cigarette] combustion. It
also posed no second-hand smoke risk.”
The ministry chief adviser on public health, Dr Ashley
Bloomfield, said that as the e-cigarette did not ignite or create
smoke, it was not covered by the smokefree
act.
"Given the lack of research on this product to
date, it is unclear what role, if any, it might play in reducing
smoking in New Zealand."
The tobacco control community is divided over the use
of harm-reduction methods for smokers who seem unable to quit despite
numerous attempts.
Manfred Neuberger, professor of preventive medicine
at the Medical University of Vienna, said in the British Medical
Journal: "Products like Ruyan which
look like cigarettes will undermine the control of smoking bans and
make it impossible to denormalise smoking in
public."
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