Poor States Last Battleground
in Smoking War -WHO

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Tobacco firms have put up strong resistance to smoking legislation in developing countries, where most smokers live, but the industry is gradually losing the battle, a senior health official said.

Pekka Puska, the World Health Organization's (WHO) top official for fighting smoking, said the tobacco industry had lobbied hard in many developing countries to keep them from ratifying and implementing a framework convention on tobacco control.

The convention, calling for specific measures like tobacco tax increases and smoke-free regulations, was adopted by WHO members in May 2002.

"After they lost the battle on global level, the tobacco industry have now moved to weaker countries, where they lobby a lot to block the anti-tobacco fight and the ratification of the treaty," Puska told Reuters.

"We see a lot of fight in the developing countries," he said on the sidelines of the World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Helsinki.

The majority of the world's 1.1 billion smokers live in developing countries. Some four to five million people die each year from tobacco-related diseases, the WHO estimates, and that will rise to 10-11 million by 2030.

A study released at the conference earlier this week showed the death toll might rise even further as more girls take up the habit than did a generation ago.

But Puska said he believed a change in attitudes toward smoking was taking place globally.

"It is only in the last few years that first industrial countries, and now gradually also developing countries, have taken real effective action by means of legislation," he said.

"We think this is a turning point, when we will really start to see major action in most parts of the world, curbing the tobacco epidemic and ultimately starting to reduce the very high death toll of tobacco."

But he added it would still take two to three decades before the actions of today lead to a fall in the number of deaths.

Reference Source 89

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