2023 – Public Health Expert, University of Otago, New Zealand

The Public Health Expert Blog is being retired after more than a decade of providing insight and commentary from leading voices in public health.

But don’t despair. The blog has been rebranded into the Public Health Expert Briefing and is now managed by the Public Health Communication Centre, based at the University of Otago, Wellington.

The Briefing will continue the blog’s legacy of providing timely and credible information on Aotearoa New Zealand’s most pressing public health issues. You can keep up with new articles published on The Briefing by subscribing here.

All previous blog articles are also now archived on the new Briefing website. And any changes made to this website will ensure that existing links are redirected to archived versions of previous blog posts on the Briefing website.

Janet Hoek, Jude Ball, Richard Edwards, Anna Graham-DeMello*

As part of the consultation process to denicotinise cigarettes and reduce the number of stores selling tobacco, Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall has outlined proposals to strengthen vaping product regulation. Noting that: “youth vaping rates are too high and we need to strike a better balance”, she has requested feedback on three additional measures: proximity restrictions for specialist vape retailers, disallowing evocative flavour names, and introducing new requirements for disposable vapes, including a reduction in the maximum nicotine concentration permitted. These proposals will help protect young people from aggressive vape marketing, but do they go far enough? In this blog, we explore additional measures that could more comprehensively regulate vaping product design and packaging, pricing, availability and promotion.

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Notes about PHE blog:

· Peer review process: Where a blog post has a single author, then the content is always peer-reviewed by at least one senior academic in public health. This is to help ensure that statements have a reasonable basis in terms of scientific plausibility and to ensure that uncertainty is appropriately acknowledged where statements have speculative aspects. For multi-authored blogs there can also be additional peer-review. Of note is that the PHE blog posts are often well-referenced so that readers can readily check the background science and arguments.

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Proposals to reduce youth vaping: Important steps but a more comprehensive approach needed

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