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How did you end the week? Thanks for welcoming others by reading this newsletter for another Saturday. Today I will tell you the latest news regarding the anti-smoking measures that will be taken in Spain in the coming months: they are all included in a plan approved a few months ago. This debate between the ministry and the autonomous communities was like an aurora borealis,I don’t know if you remember.
This week we received the first package of decisions. The royal decree where they are collected is already drawn up and ready to be approved. Now a period of allegations opens, for anyone who has something to say, and the text could undergo some slight modifications. The provisional project,which I detailed point by point in this linkgives us an idea of the direction in which the shots are going. Health authorities want to ban vaping; jam the electronic cigarette by all means possible so thatits consumption stops growing among young people.
The percentage of students aged 14 to 18 who have ever smoked traditional cigarettes has been cut in half (from 66.4% to 33.4%) over the past three decades. However, 54.6% of adolescents admit to having tried electronic cigarettes, a percentage which was only 17% ten years ago. The number has never been higher.
To stop this escalation, the Ministry of Health will, on the one hand, force manufacturers to include health warnings, even invaperswithout nicotine – “its consumption is harmful to health” – and to prohibit the pleasant flavors which make the product delicious; On the other hand, it aims to control producers more. As? In the first quarter of each year, they will have to share with Public Health their sales data, summaries of their market research and information on the preferences of different consumer groups, such as young people and non-smokers. An important Health official told me recently, when the big controversy around tobacco concerned the terraces: “don’t lose sight of the vapers, that’s where the fight will be played out”. Well that.
The survival of the industry essentially depends on these new products. Of course, the World Health Organization (WHO) has already understood and publisheda very interesting reportdismantle the strategies of companies, which “seek to engage the next generation of consumers”, from flavored products to the search for new pro-vape references among influencers. The document says it clearly: “The industry is working to reach children and young people to replace customers who leave or die. »
The new royal decree, which still needs to be approved and also leaves a transition period of almost a year to adapt the products, also regulates nicotine sachets for the first time.If you don’t know what it is, we’ll tell you here. Until now, they were in legal limbo.
While you were doing something else…
Rosa María Núñez, worker in a residence in Zaragoza.
- Reversing blindness is a big challenge for science: researcher Pia Cosma launches projectof a synthetic retina. I hope it goes very well.
- The dependency sector is aa pressure cooker about to explode: demand is unstoppable, jobs are precarious and users are financially stifled.
- The atlas of human cells, a sort of Google Maps of biology,continues to expand.
Oh, Muface!
We’ve had a Mufacian soap opera for a while. If you are not up to date, I recommend that you listen to this episode of “A subject per day” that we produced with our podcast colleagues. This week, what one could already guess was revealed: there are two positions within the government in relation to Muface.
The Ministry of Health (Sumar)is in favor of dissolutionmutuality – in terms of health care – and transfer a million mutual members and their families to the public health system while the Ministry of Public Service (PSOE), which really has the power to negotiate with private insurers, does not seem not wanting to break the game, even if it could change the rules of the game. For the moment, he asked companies to demonstratehow much does it cost themMuface patient care.
As the days go by, interesting new ramifications emerge that explain how this model, born when Franco was about to die, continues to work in 2024. How many members of Congress are mutualists who use private health care? How many senior party officials make decisions? There is a more or less unanimous feeling shared by defenders and detractors of the system: if it does not explode today – because companies end up accepting the requests or they find a creative solution out of their sleeve –, it will explode tomorrow. .
How do you see it? Tell me, if you are a mutualist, how you experience this story. And if not and you are also interested in what is happening.
Have a nice week!
