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Review
. 2007 Feb;16(1):8-14.
doi: 10.1136/tc.2005.015297.

Revising the machine smoking regime for cigarette emissions: implications for tobacco control policy

David Hammond  1 , Friedrich Wiebel, Lynn T Kozlowski, Ron Borland, K Michael Cummings, Richard J O'Connor, Ann McNeill, Greg N Connolly, Deborah Arnott, Geoffrey T Fong
Affiliations
Review

Revising the machine smoking regime for cigarette emissions: implications for tobacco control policy

David Hammond et al. Tob Control. 2007 Feb.

Abstract

Background: The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control includes provisions for testing and regulating cigarette emissions. However, the current international standard for generating cigarette emissions--the ISO machine smoking regime--is widely acknowledged to be inappropriate for purposes of setting regulatory restrictions.

Objective: To review alternatives to the ISO machine smoking regime and the extent to which they: 1) Represent human smoking behaviour, 2) Reduce the potential for industry exploitation, particularly in the area of risk communication, and 3) Serve as suitable measures for product regulation.

Methods: Emissions data from 238 Canadian cigarette brands tested under the ISO and "Canadian Intense" machine smoking regimes.

Results: None of the alternative smoking regimes, including the Canadian Intense method, are more "representative" of human smoking behaviour and none provide better predictors of human exposure.

Conclusions: Given that alternatives such as the Canadian Intense regime are subject to the same fundamental limitations as the ISO regime, key questions need to be addressed before any smoking regime should be used to set regulatory limits on smoke emissions. In the meantime, regulators should remove quantitative emission values from cigarette packages and more work should be done on alternative machine smoking methods.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None.

Comment in

References

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    1. Benowitz N L. Biomarkers of cigarette smoking. The FTC cigarette test method for determining tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide yields of U.S. cigarettes. Report of the NCI Expert Committee. Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 7. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, NIH Publication No. 96‐4028. NIH: Bethesda, MD, 1996
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