Tobacco kills roughly eight million people around the world every year, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) has long aimed for complete eradication of the substance, calling it “one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced.” This month’s ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9) of the WHO Framework Convention on...
Commending countries, including Nepal, in the World Health Organisation South- East Asia for achieving steep decline in tobacco use, the WHO on Thursday said persistent and concerted efforts over the years, which have continued despite the pandemic, must be sustained and scaled up further to rid the region of the scourge of tobacco. "Sustained political...
Overview Progress in reducing tobacco use is a key indicator for measuring countries’ efforts to implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – target 3.a under the Sustainable Development Goals agenda. Countries have adopted this indicator to report progress also towards the tobacco reduction target under the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and...
More people are smoking now than ever. In metropolitan cities like Lagos, finding a non-smoker can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. According to statistics published in the medical magazine The Lancet, the number of active smokers in 2019 has increased to 1.14 billion (1,140,000,000) people globally. Smoking is still as deadly as ever....
The number of tobacco users continues to decrease globally, going from 1.32 billion in 2015 to 1.30 billion last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said onTuesday. And according to the fourth WHO global tobacco trends report, that number is expected to continue to drop to 1.27 billion by 2025. Sixty countries are now on track to achieving the voluntary global target of a 30% per cent reduction by 2025, an increase from two years ago, when only 32 countries...
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...
On the 2nd of November 2021, the Vapour Products Association of South Africa (VPASA) organized a Diginar (digital seminar) with an unequivocal title: WHO’s (World Health Organization) Dictatorial Tobacco Control Policies Ahead of COP-9. The ninth session of Conference of the Parties (COP 9) is being held from November 8th to 13, 2021. The Framework...
On October 18, 100 tobacco control experts called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to accept the reality of safer nicotine alternatives. The letter, which harshly criticizes the WHO for its hostile stance against tobacco harm reduction (THR), arrives ahead of a gathering of the 182 countries that belong to the health agency’s Framework Convention on Tobacco...
The mandate of the group includes analyzing current tax structure of all forms of tobacco, including smokeless tobacco, and suggesting various tax rate models for consideration in the preparation of FY23 and future Union budgets. The government has set up an expert group led by a senior official in the health ministry to prepare...
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates medical products in the US, has approved an e-cigarette for sale for the first time. It authorised the marketing of three products from RJ Reynolds, under the Vuse brand. The FDA decided that the benefit to adults trying to quit smoking outweighs the risk of teenagers becoming hooked. The...
