LONDON (AP) — Tobacco use kills at atomic 5 actor bodies every year, a amount that could acceleration if countries don't booty stronger measures to action smoking, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.In a fresh address on tobacco use and control, the U.N. bureau said about 95% of the all-around citizenry is caught by laws banning smoking. WHO said secondhand smoker kills about 600,000 bodies every year.
The address describes countries' assorted strategies to barrier smoking, including attention bodies from smoke, administration bans on tobacco advertising, and adopting taxes on tobacco products. Those were included in a amalgamation of six strategies WHO apparent aftermost year, but beneath than 10% of the world's citizenry is covered by any distinct measure.
"People need more than to be told that tobacco is bad for human health," said Douglas Bettcher, director of WHO's Tobacco-Free Initiative. "They need their governments to implement the WHO Framework Convention."
Most of WHO's anti-tobacco efforts are centered on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an international treaty ratified by nearly 170 countries in 2003. The convention theoretically obliges countries to take action to reduce tobacco use, though it is unclear if they can be punished for not taking adequate measures, since they can simply withdraw from the treaty.
Other experts questioned how effective WHO's strategies were.
"It's like the well-intentioned blind leading the blind," said Patrick Basham, director of the Democracy Institute, a London and Washington-based think tank. He said WHO's policies were based more on hope than evidence.
Basham said measures like increasing taxes on tobacco products and banning advertising don't address the root causes of why people smoke. Smoking levels naturally drop off — as they have in Western countries — when populations become richer and better-educated.
Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death and WHO estimates that, unless countries take drastic action, tobacco could kill about 8 million people every year by 2030, mostly in developing countries.
Basham said officials should focus on anti-poverty measures to stem the smoking problem, though that is beyond WHO's mandate as a health agency.
"The cynical view is that the anti-tobacco lobby has itself now become an industry and we will never be able to do enough to stop smoking," Basham said. "Tobacco use will change, but it has very little to do with the kinds of things WHO is promoting."
