Teenagers continue to be initiated into smoking, especially young women. A predictor of smoking is the existence of stressors in their life. The major components of smoking motivation have been found to be similar in young smokers to those found in older smokers, except for the appearance of a group who are resisting the pressures against smoking. There is no evidence that the smokers of the future will be more extreme personality types than the smokers of 10 or more years ago. Changes in demographic characteristics of smokers in the United Kingdom and the United States in favour of relatively more women and more smokers from the poorer socio-economic groups requires investigation into whether this is attributable to different coping requirements in these groups.

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The neurotoxin gene from Clostridium barati ATCC43756 was cloned as a series of overlapping polymerase chain reaction (PCR) generated fragments using primers designed to conserve toxin sequences previously published. The toxin gene has an open reading frame (ORF) of 1268 amino acids giving a calculated molecular mass of 141,049 Da. The sequence identity between the C. barati ATCC43756 and non-proteolytic C. botulinum 202F neurotoxins is 64.2% for the light chain and 73.6% for the heavy chain. This is much lower than reported identities for the type E neurotoxins from C. botulinum and C. butyricum (96% identity between light chains and 98.8% between the heavy chains). Previously identified conserved regions in other botulinal neurotoxins were also conserved in that of C. barati. An ORF upstream of the toxin coding region was revealed. This shows strong homology to the 3' end of the gene coding for the nontoxic-nonhemagglutinin (NTNH) component of the progenitor toxin from C. botulinum type C neurotoxin.