(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  Two news stories identified this week help to explain the potential confusion and debates about e-cigarettes. On August 18th, the US government (National Institutes of Health) released a report noting that e-cigarette use by teens would likely lead to smoking tobacco. On August 19th, the Health Department in England released a research review stating that e-cigarettes were 95% less harmful than tobacco. Both of these studies are likely accurate. What is confusing is the government intentions in both cases and what fact-based health messages are intended by the release of each study. Read more>>

(An item from ISHN Member information service) An updated systematic review of school-based smoking prevention programs paradoxically shows a long-term effect of those programs but only certain types had a short term effect within one year. The authors report that " We identified 49 randomised controlled trials (over 140,000 school children) of interventions aiming to prevent children who had never smoked from becoming smokers. At longer than one year, there was a significant effect of the interventions in preventing young people from starting smoking. Programmes that used a social competence approach and those that combined a social competence with a social influence approach were found to be more effective than other programmes. However, at one year or less there was no overall effect, except for programmes which taught young people to be socially competent and to resist social influences. A smaller group of trials reported on the smoking status of all people in the class, whether or not they smoked at the start of the study. In these trials with follow-up of one year or less there was an overall small but significant effect favouring the controls. This continued after a year; for trials with follow-up longer than one year, those in the intervention groups smoked more than those in the control groups.When trials at low risk of bias from randomisation, or from losing participants, were examined separately, the conclusions remained the same. Programmes led by adults may be more effective than those led by young people. There is no evidence that delivering extra sessions makes the intervention more effective. Read more>>

(An item from ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #4, 2012 of Youth & Society suggests that school characteristics have little impact on youth smoking but tracking or streamiong by academic levels within schools may have an impact. The authors suggest that " Using the 2007 Dutch National School Survey on Substance Use, we find that individual student characteristics are more important predictors than school characteristics. Importantly, social background effects are clearly mediated by school tracks, suggesting that tracking helps us to explain social gradients in substance use. However, school context plays almost no role in adolescent smoking behavior. One exception concerns students in the general track, for whom we find that smoking is further reduced when they are placed in the same school organization as students of the vocational track. This is in line with the theory that tracking differences are magnified in a context where interaction between students from different tracks is promoted. Read more.