The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Call for united fight against tobacco use

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Thursday, Jan 17, 2008
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Call for united fight against tobacco use

Staff Reporter

The global burden of tobacco and the public health problems it posed were the topic of a discussion at a recently concluded national conference.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Public health experts have called for networking and alliances between health professionals, stakeholders, researchers and advocates to lobby for resources and fight tobacco as a major public health problem.

They also called for a total ban on tobacco advertising and misleading terms such as ‘light’ cigarettes because tobacco, in any form, even in lesser quantities caused irreparable damage to health, they pointed out.

The global burden of tobacco and the public health problems it posed were a topic of discussion at the recently concluded national conference on Emerging Issues in Public Health, organised by the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies (AMCHSS), the public health studies wing of the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology.

Harry Lando, Professor of Epidemiology, University of Minnesota, pointed out that tobacco impoverishes nations through environmental damage, increased healthcare costs, lost productivity due to illnesses and loss of foreign exchange. In India alone, there are 240 million tobacco users above the age of 15.

Dr. Lando pointed out that steps such as hiking the price of tobacco products could make a difference. According to a World Bank estimate, a 10 per cent increase in the price of cigarettes in the developing world could lead to 36 million few smokers and save nine million lives. However, hiking prices on tobacco could affect the Government’s taxation revenues and this is a major challenge before public health professionals trying to enact anti-tobacco legislations.

Prakash C. Gupta of Healis-Sekhsaria Institute for Public Health, Mumbai, pointed out that in India, smoking was only a part of the tobacco problem.

About 40 per cent of overall tobacco consumption in India was in the form of smokeless tobacco products, another 40 per cent as beedis and only about 20 per cent of tobacco was consumed as cigarettes.

K. R. Thankappan, director of AMCHSS, who spoke about the Quit Tobacco project undertaken in Kerala, said the perception among budding doctors was that low levels of smoking were less harmful to health. He pointed out that no attention was being given to formulating tobacco cessation effects and that all control programmes seemed to ignore the huge number of smokeless tobacco users.

Mark Nichter, Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of Arizona, called for doctors to address tobacco as a serious risk to public health.

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