More than 1.3 billion people use tobacco around the world, and even though more than 8 million people die each year from tobacco-related diseases, traditional combustible cigarettes are still the most common form of nicotine consumption in the world. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly believe that nicotine is responsible for smoking-related cancers and other illnesses. However, […]

When I studied epidemiology in the 1980s, Apartheid policies were still in effect in my home country, South Africa. At the time, many in the field believed that their roles transcended the narrow confines of epidemiology’s standard definition. That is, we wanted to do more than simply describe race, class and sex-based differences across metrics […]

In 1951, Sirs Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill began surveying thousands of doctors to determine the cause of rising lung cancer rates in the United Kingdom. Initial results clearly identified smoking as the culprit; and follow-up studies revealed additional causes of death attributable to the habit. This research galvanized doctors to take concrete actions: […]

The Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT)’s annual meeting went ahead March 11­–14, 2020, despite ominous COVID-19 clouds looming on the horizon. Over half of registered participants pulled out, including all speakers and participants from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But […]

The Foundation’s Tobacco Transformation Index (the “Index”) will provide quantifiable evidence over time of the steps the largest tobacco companies are taking to achieve a world free of combustible cigarettes and other high-risk tobacco products and actions they take to impede that progress. Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products (STOP) supports the Global Tobacco […]