uk bat.com - Harm reduction

Harm reduction

We have a responsibility to seek to reduce the health risks of our products. Cigarette smoking is a cause of serious and fatal diseases and the only way to avoid the health risks associated with tobacco products is to not use them.

However, the World Health Organisation has estimated that, as the global population increases, so will the number of smokers worldwide. So developing reduced-risk products for those adults who choose to use tobacco products is a priority. There are many challenges in this: the science is complex; collaboration is needed between scientists, tobacco companies and regulators; products need to meet consumer expectations; and we need a regulatory framework that supports tobacco harm reduction.

Harm reduction is about finding practical ways to minimise the health impact of an inherently risky activity or behaviour, without seeking to stop it entirely. An example of harm reduction that is familiar to most of us is the use of seat belts and airbags in cars. The science of tobacco harm reduction is complex, extremely challenging and spans many scientific disciplines. Our annual R&D spend is significant, which reflects the continued importance we place in this work area.

The science of harm reduction

Find out more about our harm reduction research programme

Regulatory policies based on discouraging people from starting to smoke and encouraging them to quit have been effective. We believe there could be further public health gains for the millions of adults globally who will continue to consume tobacco products if tobacco regulatory policies included harm reduction. However, few governments currently support this view.

Our role

As a manufacturer of tobacco products, we have a responsibility to pursue ways in which we might reduce the health risks of our products. Although nicotine is not completely harmless, contrary to what many people believe it is not associated with most tobacco-related diseases. There is widespread agreement in the scientific community that it is the toxicants in the tobacco and tobacco smoke that are responsible for the majority of these.

So on a ‘product risk continuum’ where products can be lined up in decreasing order of risk, conventional cigarettes can be considered most risky.

Our previous efforts at test marketing lower-risk products confirmed that a ‘one product fits all’ approach cannot achieve tobacco harm reduction, so our approach is to offer make available a range of reduced-risk tobacco and nicotine products for adult consumers:

Reduced toxicant cigarettes

It is well established that people who smoke more cigarettes a day and over a longer period of time have an increased risk of developing a smoking-related disease. So we are researching whether cigarettes with lower levels of toxicants in the tobacco smoke might lower health risks for those adults who don’t want to quit. Our approach is to:

• determine which toxicants in smoke are significant for disease and develop tools to measure smokers’ exposure to them;
• Develop products that may substantially reduce exposure to these significant toxicants and. Through clinical testing, demonstrate that they do; and
• Assess whether this reduction in exposure can reasonably be expected to reduce the risk of one or more specific diseases.

Low-toxicant smokeless tobacco

Certain low-toxicant smokeless tobacco products, such as Swedish-style snus, present substantially lower overall health risks than cigarette smoking.

Regulatory approved nicotine products

British American Tobacco has established Nicoventures Limited, a stand-alone company which is managed separately from the Group’s tobacco businesses and focuses exclusively on the development and commercialisation of innovative regulatory approved nicotine products.

Nicoventures aims to provide adult smokers with a range of alternative products - currently unavailable on the market - that will offer them much of the experience they expect to get from a cigarette but without the real and serious health risks of smoking.

The creation of Nicoventures is a natural extension of British American Tobacco’s approach to tobacco harm reduction that has been developed over a number of years.

In June 2011 Nicoventures announced its first commercial agreement. Further information can be found on the Nicoventures website .

Engagement

Our work to develop reduced-risk products will be pointless if we cannot successfully bring them to market. So we are engaging with the scientific community and regulators to build support for tobacco harm reduction as a pragmatic public health policy.

We publish a specialist tobacco science website – bat-science.com  – written by scientists for scientists. The site is designed to provide an overview of our current research and development programmes, our research data and our recently published papers and posters for any scientist with an interest in tobacco-related research or related disciplines.

You can read more about our research, our scientific approach to harm reduction and our specialist science website in our Research and Development section.

We believe tobacco product regulation should be based on sound scientific evidence and be developed through transparent and accountable consultation with all relevant stakeholders. While some governments have resisted our scientific contribution in the past, opportunities have arisen to provide evidence towards the development of tobacco harm reduction policies.

US Food and Drugs Administration submissions

The approach taken by the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) for policy development involves all interested parties and is based on scientific evidence.

You can see examples of submissions we have made to the FDA and the Institute of Medicine below:

Draft guidelines on modified risk tobacco product applications - June 2012 (2.7 mb)

Tobacco product analysis - May 2012 (1.4 mb)

Harmful and potentially harmful constituents of tobacco products and tobacco smoke - October 2011 (2.3 mb)

Scientific evaluation of modified risk tobacco products - September 2011 (4.9 mb)

Scientific standards for studies on modified risk tobacco products - June 2011 (608 kb)

Scientific standards for studies on reduced risk tobacco products - February 2011 (102 kb)

Tobacco Constituents - May 2010 (658 kb)

Regulation of tobacco products - September 2009 (5.5 mb)

In addition, in 2011, our Chief Scientific Officer sat on the expert panel of a workshop held by the US FDA on developing scientific standards for the evaluation of modified risk tobacco products.

Recent publications from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Tobacco Products Scientific Committee and the World Health Organisation’s scientific advisory group suggests that future regulation of combustible tobacco products could be based on the toxicant levels emitted from them. The harm reduction potential of such regulation is not clearly understood but our research into reduced toxicant cigarettes will prepare us for the regulatory future.

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