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How did you finish the week? Thank you for welcoming the rest by reading this newsletter for another Saturday. Today I will tell you the latest we have learned about the anti-smoking measures that will be taken in Spain in the coming months: they are all drawn up in a plan approved a few months ago. That debate between the Ministry and the autonomous communities was like the northern lights,I don’t know if you remember.
This week we learned about the first package of decisions. The royal decree where they are collected is already written and ready to be approved. Now a period of allegations opens, for anyone who has something to say, and the text could undergo some minor modification. The provisional project,which I broke down point by point in this linkgives us an idea of where the shots are going. Health authorities want to fence off vaping; corner the electronic cigarette in all possible ways so thatits consumption stops growing among younger people.
The percentage of students between 14 and 18 years old who have ever smoked traditional cigarettes has been reduced by half (from 66.4% to 33.4%) in the last three decades. However, 54.6% of adolescents admit that they have tried electronic cigarettes, a percentage that was only 17% a decade ago. The number has never been so high.
To stop this escalation, the Ministry of Health is going, on the one hand, to force manufacturers to include health warnings, even in thevaperswithout nicotine – “its consumption is harmful to health” – and to prohibit pleasant flavors that 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 studies and information on the preferences of different consumer groups, such as young people and non-smokers. An important Health official told me not long ago, when the big controversy surrounding tobacco was the terraces: “don’t lose sight of the vapers, that’s where the fight will be.” Well that.
The survival of the industry basically depends on these new products. The World Health Organization (WHO) has already caught on, of course, and publisheda very interesting reportto dismantle the strategies of companies, which “seek to engage the next generation of consumers”, from flavored products to the search for new pro-vaping references in influencers. The document says it clearly: “The industry works to reach children and young people to replace clients who leave or die.”
The new royal decree, which has yet to be approved and also leaves a transition period of almost a year to adapt the products, also regulates nicotine pouches for the first time.If you don’t know what they are, we’ll tell you here. Until now they were in legal limbo.
While you were doing other things…
Rosa María Núñez, worker at a residence in Zaragoza.
- Reversing blindness is a great challenge for science: researcher Pia Cosma starts a projectfrom a synthetic retina. I hope it goes very well.
- The dependency sector is apressure cooker about to explode: demand is unstoppable, jobs are precarious and users are financially suffocated.
- The atlas of human cells, a kind of Google Maps of biology,continues to expand.
Oh, Muface!
We have a Mufacian soap opera for a while. If you are not up to date, I recommend listening to this episode of ‘A topic a day’ that we did with our podcast colleagues. This week what we could already guess has been revealed: there are two positions within the Government in relation to Muface.
The Ministry of Health (Sumar)is in favor of dissolvingmutuality – in terms of healthcare – and transfer a million mutual members and their families to public healthcare while the Ministry of Public Function (PSOE), who really has the powers to negotiate with private insurers, seems not to want to break the deck, although it could change the rules of the game. At the moment it has asked the companies to demonstratehow much does it cost themcare for Muface patients.
As the days go by, new interesting ramifications emerge that explain how this model, which began when Franco was about to die, continues to work in 2024. How many of the deputies in Congress are mutualists who use private healthcare? How many of the senior officials of the parties who make the 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 agreeing to the demands or they come up with 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 are living this story. And if you are not and you are interested in what is happening, too.
Good week!
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