Global disparities in the regulation of electronic cigarettes

Abstract

Authorities facing aggressive e-cigarette marketing to vulnerable populations 1,2 often fall back on legislations predating e-cigarettes 3 to regulate these products.We investigated disparities in e-cigarette regulations/bans for countries in the six WHO regions and four World Bank income groups.Countries' regulations/bans on e-cigarettes were coded Yes (1) or No (0) for presence of a regulation/ban using the Institute of Global Tobacco Control, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 4 , and Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control websites 5 .For countries listed as 'unknown' on both websites, we checked government and other online sources for e-cigarette regulations.Countries' WHO region 6 and World Bank income group categories 7 were entered in a spreadsheet.Frequency distributions and chi-squared tests were conducted using SPSS v26.Independent bivariate logistic regression analyses used the WHO region and World Bank income group as predictor variables with significance at p<0.05.Among 194 'countries' (193 WHO member states/entities and Niue), 66.5%