The Tasmanian government is considering whether to raise the age at which people can legally purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21 or possibly even 25. California is also moving to increase the legal…
- Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney
Last week, I wrote about factoid-driven myths that just refuse to die. In less than a week, the piece has had more than 1.184 million readers. There’s plainly a big appetite for smoking myth busting, so…
Across forty years I’ve come to recognise many factoid-driven myths about smoking that just won’t die. If I asked for a dollar each time I had to refute these statements, I’d have accumulated a small fortune…
Surely, no bookmaker will take bets on what the principal recommendation of Leyonhjelm’s wasteful exercise will be: that tobacco tax should fall.
ABC’s Catalyst episode “Wi-Fried” claimed that mobile phones and Wi-Fi might be a cancer risk, but the leading experts are not so convinced.
The traditional starting point for considering the scientific impact of research are its citations. But judging which research applications should be funded is a very inexact science.
Like a lot of people, I’m embarrassed to be living in an advanced industrialised OECD nation where our national flag includes that of a foreign nation. I just want us to grow up. Canada, a significant…
My father Alec, who died peacefully at 89 in his sleep, had dementia and lived in a nursing home for the last seven years of his life. After Mum died, he lived alone in their Mittagong home for about a…
The central arguments made for the importance of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) are that they are an exceptionally good way to quit smoking and that they represent trivial risk to health compared…
With massive public displays of fireworks set for New Year’s eve tonight, the accidental Senator David Leyonhjelm has recently called for the abolition of the ban on personal purchasing of fireworks throughout…
Picture a scientist employed by a pharmaceutical company publishing research results that were important bricks in a wall of evidence that could massively benefit their employer down the track. Imagine…
It is three years since Australia fully implemented its historic tobacco plain packaging law. From December 1, 2012, all tobacco products have been required to be sold in the mandated standardised packs…
At the centre of claims about wind farms allegedly causing health problems is the infrasound that wind turbines generate as they turn in the wind. Infrasound is sound below 20Hz, which is generally inaudible…
Raising tobacco tax is the single most important factor driving down smoking.
A former dean of Sydney University’s Faculty of Medicine, where I work, once appointed me to a role where I was to try and increase the news media profile of our staff’s research and to encourage them…
Dr Bronwyn King is an oncologist. She is an honorary radiation oncologist at Melbourne’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and works at Epworth Healthcare where she treats cancer patients. She has helped treat…
This is the full text of a paper I presented to the Oceania Tobacco Control Conference, Perth on October 21, 2015. E-cigarettes are the latest innovation in nicotine delivery products to fly the harm-reduction…
As smoking continues its inexorable southward journey toward single-digit percentages of populations being smokers, it’s common to hear people say the smokers who remain are all “hard core”, heavily dependent…
Every traveller forms impressions about patterns of frequently or seldom seen cultural differences when visiting other countries. You see far fewer women than men on the streets of more conservative Islamic…
On September 9, the Financial Review carried a lead story about how Sydney University, fresh from efforts to significantly reduce fossil fuels within its $1.4b portfolio, was now investing in British American…
Electronic (e-)cigarettes are attracting massive interest for their potential in helping smokers quit, to reduce harm in those who switch from cigarettes or cut down, and in reducing the uptake of smoking…
Internoise is the world’s premier research conference for acousticians. The 2015 meeting is being held right now in San Francisco. Buried among the hundreds of papers is one that you could easily take…
Imagine you were about to buy a property and were advised that in two years time, a major freeway would be built two hundred metres away, greatly diminishing the value of your purchase. Then imagine you…
I recently noticed a tweet from @CareersatBAT about how British American Tobacco South Africa had packed 200,000 meals of donated food for the Million Meal Challenge being run by Stop Hunger Now Southern…
The Australian newspaper’s campaign against wind farms continued this morning with a page one story from the paper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd.
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