Mr. Gordon Akurugu, Volta Regional Head of the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), has called for effective inter-agency collaboration and harmonisation to guarantee success in enforcing tobacco regulations in the country. He said with the marketing and consumption of tobacco products progressing into diverse forms and trends, concerted efforts by stakeholders had become necessary in...
The US will miss its 5% smoking prevalence target by 2030, known as Healthy People 2030, without hiking taxes on cigarettes, finds an analysis published online in the journal Tobacco Control. Only 5 states and the District of Columbia (DC) are on track to meet this goal; the other 45 states will need to raise excise...
British American Tobacco SA (BATSA), one of South Africa’s largest tobacco companies, has called on the government to introduce a new minimum price for cigarettes in the country. In a statement on Wednesday (10 November), BATSA said that a new floor price will help combat illegal suppliers and improve tax collection in the country. A survey by market...
President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda depends a lot on smokers and their compulsive habit. Smoking generates tax revenue — lots of it. Part of the theory is that high taxes, restrictions on advertising, research on the deleterious health effects of smoking, and the cultural stigma surrounding smoking will wean Americans off tobacco, but too...
At the ninth session of the Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, or COP 9, countries have adopted a proposal to set up an investment fund that would help generate additional resources for tobacco control. The proposed investment fund aims to raise $50 million, mainly from governments, and...
The Vision for Alternative Development (VALD) has reiterated its call to government of Ghana to ban the sale of single-stick cigarette in the country. It wants government to also make tobacco products very expensive to curb its usage. According to Mr. Labram Musah who is Executive Director at VALD, the sale of cigarette in single stick...
The Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), on Thursday, declared that tobacco industry interference remains a major challenge to effective tobacco control in Nigeria and Africa. CAPPA alerted that the tobacco industry’s meddlesomeness with governments’ health policies was endangering regulatory efforts in clear contravention of the National Tobacco Control Act, 2015, and the National...
On the first day of virtual tobacco treaty talks, Zimbabwe joined a small cadre of countries in delaying meaningful negotiations. Its actions come weeks after a new report found Zimbabwe to be the worst country on the continent in safeguarding public policy from tobacco industry interference. The Zimbabwe delegation raised a range of questions and procedural...
Summary The index by STOP — the global tobacco industry watchdog — shows that regionally, Uganda took fifth position while Kenya came nineth. A total of 31 countries registered a deterioration in the index partly due to the fact that many governments were short of public health resources during the pandemic, which forced them...
This COP season, it may be time to draw parallels between two very similar gatherings with diametrically opposite profiles and approaches. Climate change and tobacco-related harms. Both are urgent issues facing humankind. Both are being addressed by global treaties and conventions. For both the problems, a wide range of solutions are coming from old...
