European Regulatory Science on Tobacco: Policy implementation to reduce lung diseases (EUREST-PLUS)

Researcher: Karin Hummel

Co-researchers: Marc Willemsen, Gera Nagelhout, Hein de Vries, Bas van den Putte, Geoffrey Fong, Constantine Vardavas, EUREST-PLUS Consortium

Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Objective: The main objective of EUREST-PLUS is to monitor and evaluate the impact of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) within the context of the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) ratification at a European level. These articles in the TPD address issues of tobacco product ingredients, additives, reporting, packaging, labelling, illicit trade, cross border sales, and e-cigarettes. Furthermore, the FCTC articles also indicate aspects of avoidance of secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure, tobacco taxation, advertising and issues of tobacco dependence and cessation. For complete information about this project, please go to
www.eurestplus.eu.

Method: The ITC Project which includes the EUREST-PLUS Project is conducting large-scale prospective cohort surveys of tobacco use to evaluate FCTC policies. Each ITC Survey includes key measures for each FCTC policy domain that are identical or functionally similar across the participating countries to facilitate cross-country comparisons. The evaluation studies conducted from the ITC Surveys take advantage of natural experiments created when an ITC country implements a policy: changes in policy relevant variables in that country from pre- to post-policy survey waves are compared to other ITC countries where that policy has not changed. This research design provides high levels of internal validity, allowing more confident judgments regarding the possible causal impact of the policy.

Results: None yet.

Publications: None yet.