The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing more than 8 million people a year around the world.
More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
Around 80 per cent of the 1.1 billion smokers worldwide live in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest. Tobacco use contributes to poverty by diverting household spending from basic needs such as food and shelter to tobacco. This spending behaviour is difficult to curb because tobacco is so addictive.
The economic costs of tobacco use are substantial and include significant health care costs for treating the disease caused by tobacco use as well as the lost human capital that results from tobacco-attributable morbidity and mortality.
In some countries, children from poor households are employed in tobacco farming to boost family income. These children are especially vulnerable to “green tobacco sickness”, which is caused by the nicotine that is absorbed through the skin from the handling of wet tobacco
As called for in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Governments must comprehensively enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship (Article 13) at international expos and conferences, in order to ensure their events and programmes are tobacco free and that their activities and participants are not sponsored by tobacco companies.
The world must unite to halt the tobacco industry’s aggressive marketing of its products, that cause addiction, suffering and millions of deaths each year.
This renewed call comes in light of reports of tobacco companies aiming to establish new partnerships with governments to sponsor events or pavilions in world expos, in a country that has already ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
