Long wait ahead for safer cigarettes

TRIALS of so-called "safer cigarettes" have produced promising results but are still some way from becoming a reality for smokers, researchers will reveal this month.

British American Tobacco (BAT) has been conducting tests on the experimental cigarettes, designed to produce less toxic chemicals than normal varieties.

But although the products have been successful in reducing exposure to the harmful components of tobacco, the company will tell a conference in Scotland that it still has to show that cutting levels of these "toxicants" reduces the risk to health.

Producing a "safer" cigarette - cigarettes contain 4,000 potentially harmful chemicals - has become critically important for the tobacco industry as it faces declining sales in western countries amid accusations from health campaigners that its products cause millions of deaths and cases of ill health every year.

The trials by BAT, the world's second largest tobacco company, tested different ways of creating cigarettes that produce less toxic chemicals as they burn. One process involved treating the tobacco with enzymes that reduce the effects of toxic ingredients while a second used new filters designed to absorb harmful chemicals.

Chris Proctor, the chief scientific officer at Southampton-based BAT, said: "We have been looking at ways in which you could invent new technologies and put them into cigarettes to reduce some of the smoke toxicants and the things people think cause diseases.

"This is the first time we have put several different technologies into a cigarette, made a prototype and then got some German smokers in a clinical setting to switch from their normal cigarettes to one of these."