Experts urge global effort to combat growing tobacco use

Tobacco kills one person every six seconds and could kill one billion people in the 21st century, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report based in part on research by experts at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The new report, entitled "Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic," was released Feb. 7. It describes the tobacco epidemic as a worldwide killer that is completely preventable.

The report outlines a series of six steps to control tobacco use around the world. The comprehensive policy is called MPOWER, which WHO will help member countries enact. WHO believes its policy proposal could lead to a drastic reduction in tobacco deaths. MPOWER stands for Monitor, Protect, Offer, Warn, Enforce and Raise.

The steps envisioned by WHO include: collecting data on the use of tobacco and efforts to prevent its use in different countries, helping people avoid secondhand tobacco smoke, giving people help when they want to quit, educating people around the world about the harmful effects of tobacco products, using politics to limit the reach of tobacco and increasing taxes on tobacco.

These steps are part of WHO's approach to make governments more active contributors in the global fight against tobacco use. This approach is critical because the number of tobacco users in developing countries is rising rapidly, even as it is slowly declining in many developed countries. The governments of these countries are in a position to create life-saving policies that will reach their citizens, the report indicates.

The data collected for the report show that current tobacco prevention efforts are woefully underfunded: For every $5,000 collected from tobacco taxes, only $1 is invested in tobacco prevention policies or other efforts to control tobacco use. Yet, even for poor countries, controlling tobacco can be cheap. The report found that if tobacco taxes were raised by 70 percent, deaths resulting from tobacco use would decrease by 25 percent.

Without government intervention, the report says, the citizens of these countries will pay the highest price in health care costs and the human death toll. Furthermore, the health effects of the tobacco epidemic are only accelerating because of the long time lapse between the initiation of tobacco use and the onset of disease - people getting sick today may have started smoking a decade ago or more.

With this initial report and others to follow, WHO hopes to focus global efforts on curtailing tobacco's rapid growth. The Feb. 7 report makes it clear that without a global effort to combat tobacco use, the world will pay a tragic price.