Anti-tobacco treaty gets unanimous support
All 192 members of the World Health Organization today adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) aimed at curbing tobacco-related deaths and disease.
The director general of the WHO, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland was delighted with the unanimous vote on the convention, which is the first international treaty on public health.
“Today, we are acting to save billions of lives and protect people’s health for generations to come. This is a historic moment in global public health,” she told delegates at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.
The convention requires countries to:
– impose restrictions on tobacco advertising, sponsorship and promotion;
– establish new labelling and indoor air controls;
– and strengthen legislation to clamp down on tobacco smuggling.
The FCTC will come into force when forty member states have ratified it, and the outgoing director general urged countries to do so quickly.
The WHO has led a four-year campaign to introduce the FCTC, as tobacco is now one of the biggest killers globally.
Five million people are thought to die each year from the effects of smoking, and what was once a problem of industrialised countries has now taken on epidemic proportions in the developing world.
Indeed, within five years the WHO estimates that there will be 1.1 billion smokers around the world – 800,000 of whom will live in developing countries.
A disproportionately high number of people are now dying of cancer in the third world because of a failure to detect the disease early enough to treat it and because of poor access to treatment.
And the death toll could double by 2020 if countries do not implement the measures of the FCTC, with 70% of the deaths occurring in poorer nations, experts warn.
Analysts have suggested that the convention could help rein in international tobacco firms that have sought new markets in the developing world. Some companies have been accused of using ‘dirty tricks’ to draw in new customers, such as handing out free cigarettes to young people in Africa and Asia.
