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The ban on cigarette sponsorship for sports activities, especially football, will not be withdrawn by the government, deputy minister of Youth and Sports Datuk Razali Ibrahim told the Dewan Rakyat Thursday.
Razali said there will be no change in the government's commitment to support the World Health Organisation's (WHO) global ban on cigarette companies sponsoring any kind of sports activities under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
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When it comes to smoking, Indonesia remains the last paradise for a puff in Southeast Asia. Those addicted to cigarettes can openly light up in public places without worrying about tough anti-tobacco penalties found in the rest of the region.
This reality has been shaped by the power of local and multinational tobacco companies on the archipelago of some 224 million people.
At the finals for the recent ‘Mild Live Wanted 2009' countrywide talent contest, in the former colonial city of Bandung, competing musicians belted out their songs from around 3 p.m till midnight.
For Indonesia's small, yet vocal, anti-tobacco activists, these concerts - billed to promote local talent - offered more than music to fill their ears. They were the latest in a string of publicity drives of the powerful multinational tobacco company Philip Morris International (PMI) in the country. . . .
The prospect of more deaths from this ”smoking epidemic” has still to move Jakarta, which is still to sign the world's first public health treaty - the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which has been in force since early 2005.
By contrast, this treaty has been signed by Indonesia's nine neighbours in the region, which include Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. . . .
But in other forms of entertainment, the publicity for tobacco companies are more direct, revealed Kania during a telephone interview from Jakarta. ”There was a film for teenagers last year where one of the actresses, who is still in junior high school, was smoking in scenes.”
Such an effort to glamorise smoking goes to extremes, at times. ”There are so many scenes of people smoking in Indonesian movies where the camera even zooms in to show the cigarette brand,” adds Kania. ”There is no regulation like in other countries.”
It is little wonder why a regional anti-tobacco lobby has described Southeast Asia's largest country as a ”cash cow” for the tobacco industry.
Over 50 delegates from across the region are expected to converge in Barbados for the Caribbean Sub-regional Meeting on Tobacco Surveillance and Policy Development, slated for November 16 to 20.
The meeting, a collaborative effort among the Pan-American Health Organisation - Office of Caribbean Program Coordination and the Tobacco Control Team Washington DC; the Office of Smoking and Health - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention USA; and Barbados' Health Ministry, will look at the implementation of Articles 5.3 and 13 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
Article 5.3 of the FCTC addresses "Protection of Policies from Commercial and Other Vested Interests of the Tobacco Industry", while Article 13 examines "Tobacco Advertising, Promotion and Sponsorship".
The forum will also assess the use of tobacco surveillance data for the development of effective and evidence-based tobacco control policies.
CHANGI Airport has put its weight behind a global airports group opposing a World Health Organisation (WHO) proposal to ban the sale of duty-free tobacco products on airport premises.
The Airports Council International (ACI), which groups 1,679 airports worldwide, including Changi, maintains that this move will hurt airport earnings, as well as penalise the travelling public.
The issue surfaced at the group's annual meeting recently, in response to suggestions made by the WHO that such a ban would stem the illegal trade in tobacco products.
Member airports agree that they will not stand for such a ban and will work with their respective governments to protect the interests of passengers and the rights of airports and retailers.
This was one of several resolutions approved at the end of the ACI's two-day gathering in Kuala Lumpur last week.
Brazil is pushing to enforce smoking bans and backing nicotine replacement therapies in an attempt to keep chipping away at tobacco-use statistics. Raising the price of cigarettes would also help. Claudia Jurberg reports.
Taxes on tobacco products generated income of around US$ 2.2 billion for the Brazilian government in 2008, but that doesn’t mean the Brazilian government is going easy on the tobacco industry.
For the past two decades, Brazil has been at the forefront of global tobacco control initiatives. Vera da Costa e Silva, a public health specialist who advises the government on tobacco control, is proud to note that Brazil was the first country to ban the use of misleading adjectives such as “light” and “mild” from cigarette packages back in 2001. That move was in line with a law passed a year earlier requiring cigarette manufacturers to include pictorial health warnings covering at least 100% of one of the two main sides of a pack. These warnings often depict people in advanced stages of tobacco-related illness.
As a result of such initiatives, smoking prevalence has come down in the past two decades from 34% of the adult population in 1989 to 15% last year, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Health. But the declining trend has tailed off over the past few years as tobacco companies target new consumers, notably women. Meanwhile, 200 000 Brazilians die every year from tobacco-related diseases, according to the National Cancer Institute (INCA).
One area in which Brazilian tobacco control has faltered is in the enforcement of other key tobacco control measures, such as smoking bans in enclosed public places.
Six years after the ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship in the UK, a London-based sports body stands accused of breaching the law by promoting a cigarette brand on its website.[1] The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) which represents the world's top male tennis players, is responsible for the sponsorship contracts for the various international tournaments. The next ATP World Tour tournament, which is due to take place in Basel, Switzerland from 31 October to 8 November, is sponsored by Davidoff, a cigarette brand manufactured by Imperial Tobacco. The Swiss indoor tournament is believed to be the only one in the world to be sponsored by a tobacco company.
British-based Imperial Tobacco acquired the Davidoff cigarette brand in 2006 and has exploited the weak law in Switzerland which still allows events to be sponsored by tobacco companies, although tobacco advertising on television is banned. However, the televising of the event means that tobacco advertising will be beamed into the homes of more than one billion people worldwide, [2] contrary to Article 13 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which has been signed by 160 countries worldwide. [3]
ASH has written to the ATP urging the organisation to end its ties with the tobacco industry when the current contract comes to an end and is seeking clarification from the Department of Health regarding the possible breach of UK law.
Health experts believe that consumption of tobacco in Pakistan is becoming more and more alarming because its incidence is increasing among youth of Pakistan especially in schools, colleges and universities.
According to an estimate, Pakistanis smoke away Rs50 billion annually. Around 100,000 persons die every year in Pakistan due to diseases related to tobacco use. There are over 30 million smokers in Pakistan of which 37% are male while 9% female and about 1,200 youngsters take up smoking every day. Tobacco is the cause of at least 85% cases of lung cancer, cancer of mouth, throat, kidney, bladder and stroke, besides chronic bronchitis and emphysema.
Health experts say that Pakistan needs to reduce tobacco use to control non-communicable diseases and achieve the related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that can only be done by removing lacunas in current Anti-Smoking Ordinance because legislation and its implementation in true letter and spirit is the key to effective tobacco control.
"Markets like Pakistan are fair grounds for tobacco sales of big tobacco companies because of huge young and illiterate population, loose price controls, permission of sale of open or small packs of cigarettes, ignorance about toxic constituents and emissions of cigarettes and diverse health impacts; last but not the least due to lacunas in 'Prohibition of Smoking and Protection of Non-Smokers Health Ordinance 2002'," said Head of Community Medicine at Islamabad Medical & Dental College Professor Dr Muhammad Ashraf Chaudhry while talking to 'The News' on lacunas in the ordinance.
There are now smoking bans in place in over 70 countries across the world, but in Lebanon, where smokers seem to vastly outnumber nonsmokers, there have been no such efforts to curb tobacco use. In fact, Lebanon seems to be something of a smoker's safe haven. Gemmayzeh, arguably Beirut's most popular bar and restaurant district, will on Wednesday host its second smoke-free night this year in a bid to raise awareness on the dangers of tobacco.
Following the success of a no-smoking night in February, volunteers from the Beirut Metropolitan and Sahel Metn Rotaract Clubs decided to organize another to urge Lebanese authorities to encourage tobacco-free habits across the country. "We're looking for sustainability in this campaign," said Saiid Saber, a Rotaract volunteer.
"Our objective is to have regular smoke-free nights in all areas and in the long-term, to present a draft law to Parliament which restricts smoking in public places." The clubs have also drawn up an online petition urging Lebanon to ban smoking in public places.
Saber said that although Beirut is a signatory to the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2005 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, it has failed to ratify the document and has done little to enforce it.
"Here things have been done in slow motion," he
Much is written about smoking being unhealthy and harmful, but it is also a highly expensive habit. Spending on tobacco drives out critical expenditures that cover basic needs. This is most significant in low-income families, affecting the smoker and his or her family.
According to a report that was recently published in the International Resource Center, a study conducted in Indonesia found that children living with a smoker are more malnourished than those children that live with non-smokers. Malnutrition amongst children remains one of the world’s leading public health challenges and is associated directly or indirectly with more than 50 percent of the 11 million estimated preventable child deaths, annually.
According to Dr. Zuhdi Al-Imam, a consultant in Pediatric pulmonary medicine, smoking increases the chance of children getting chronic pulmonary diseases such as asthma. Moreover, it worsens the symptoms of an existing pulmonary disease, and worryingly, affects younger children more than older ones. . . .
It is increasingly evident that secondhand smoke exposure poses a significant health risk to children and this also suggests that there is really, no safe level of exposure.”
The Kingdom is a member of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and according to a report recently published in Saudi Gazette, new anti-smoking laws are being set in place to ban smoking in public places and will include fines of up to 200 Saudi riyals.
A Swiss antismoking campaign group is concerned that weak legislation in the country is being exploited by Imperial Tobacco to sponsor a tennis tournament and promote its brand of cigarettes and other products. The company is the fourth largest tobacco company in the world.
Switzerland is a sanctuary for the tobacco industry, said Pascal Diethelm, director of the antismoking group OxyRomandie, ahead of the Davidoff Swiss indoor tournament, which starts on 31 October as part of the Association of Tennis Professionals World Tour 500. The tournament, which is one of the last tobacco sponsored tennis events in the world, is being used by the company to intensively advertise its Davidoff brand, on court hoardings and the uniforms of line judges and ball girls and boys, said Mr Diethelm.
The last time the tournament was held in Basel in 2008, the "players drowned in an advertising soup for Davidoff," he said.
He added, "At the end of the match the young ball boys and ball girls received a medal from Roger Federer in recognition of having served the cause of Davidoff so well. Each medal bore the Davidoff logo in order to make sure that these potential future smokers will know which cigarette brand to choose when they start smoking."
OxyRomandie is appealing to the federal tribunal, Switzerland’s supreme court, against a ruling from the Independent Complaints Authority for Radio and Television that Swiss television is allowed to show the tournament even though Swiss law bans tobacco advertising on television.
The Good Life—that is the art of living. A culture of its own that revolves around taking time, perceiving the world with all the senses in order to experience the fine nuances of pleasure. Davidoff's "The Good Life" campaign. The Davidoff Swiss indoor tennis tournament is under fire.
Jordan is committed to the implementation of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC), Minister of Health Nayef Fayez said on Tuesday, noting that it was the second country in the region to endorse it.
The Ministry of Health has formed a committee to draw up a plan to implement articles 9 and 10 of the convention, which entered into force in 2005, he added.
"We are studying the possibility of enlarging the graphic warning printed on tobacco packets from 30 per cent to 50 per cent of the pack's total size," Fayez said at a meeting of 20 FCTC state parties to discuss the implementation of articles 9 and 10 yesterday.
He added that the ministry is also studying printing other graphics related to the impact of smoking on health.
Member states of WHO's Western Pacific region have unanimously agreed on a new action plan to tackle the huge burden of tobacco-related illness in the region. Margaret Harris Cheng reports.
To the surprise and delight of tobacco-control campaigners, a plan to operationalise the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was passed with barely a murmur of dissent at the WHO's Western Pacific regional meeting held in Hong Kong last month.
Although representatives of three of the world's biggest tobacco producers—China, the USA, and Japan—were present when the plan came up for discussion, only China voiced any misgivings about the plan. “The action plan should offer guidance—it should not be a mandatory requirement for member states”, China's representative told the meeting.
The ease with which the plan was accepted was a surprise because it is considered a radical departure from its predecessors (this is the fifth such plan for the WHO's Western Pacific region). For the first time, the plan sets out objectives for member states and a timeframe (2010—14) in which those objectives should ideally be reached. All member states are expected to attend a progress review in 2012, and be ready and willing to explain what stage they are at with tobacco control and why they have, or have not, achieved their objectives.
It was this, the setting of very specific objectives, that made China somewhat uncomfortable.
In Vietnamese tobacco is called 'thouc la', which means 'medicinal leaves'. Given a reported 40,000 die each year from lung cancer, it is not the most apposite name. . . .
Huong typifies the male-smoking population of Vietnam, considered one of the biggest in the world: 56 percent of the country's estimated 86 million population. The figure could be higher, said health officials who spoke with IPS. China, Malaysia and Laos all record higher figures, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
"It's a huge burden to the health system," Dr Nguyen Tuan Lam of the Tobacco Free Initiative of WHO told IPS in a telephone interview. He believes the official number of lung cancer deaths is massively underreported, saying it could be closer to 70,000. Compare this figure with the incidence of traffic accidents, often called a "hidden epidemic" in the motorcycle-riding South-east Asian country, which accounted for a comparatively lower 12,000 deaths in 2008.
Compared to men, there are extremely few female smokers in Vietnam. In fact, the communist nation has one of the lowest female smoking rates in the world at 2.1 percent of the population.
"The attitude here is that only naughty girls smoke. It's not ladylike and it's not nice," said Lam.
Since Vietnam ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in December 2004, it has banned all forms of advertising, increased taxes on cigarettes and last year added larger warning labels to packaging.
In late August government announced that starting Jan. 1, 2010, smoking would be prohibited in public places
Northern tourist town Ha Long City will tell its smokers to butt out, particularly in public areas. Ha Long will become the country’s second smoke-free city thanks to a project launched on September 26 by U.S.-based Campaign for Tobacco - Free Kids in the city.
Ha Long, in northern Quang Ninh Province, is home to UNESCO-listed Ha Long Bay, one of the major tourist destinations in northern Vietnam.
The US$284,500 project is being run by the U.S. organization and the Vietnam Union of Sciences and Technology Associations
Once again the profit motive may trump the government in its efforts to improve the general health of the nation. The government had announced the introduction of pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs and had given the industry a six-month deadline to print them as from January 1st 2010; thus joining 30 other countries having similar warnings. . . .
It is reported that a series of meetings between industry representatives and senior officials of the health department has been held in an effort to slow down the implementation of the requirement for pictorial warnings on packets. . . .
We are a desperately unhealthy nation with a poor spread of primary healthcare services; and an even poorer spread of specialist oncology units. The causal linkage between smoking, cancers, and respiratory illness is well known. Our implementation of anti-smoking legislation has been patchy at best and as the tobacco producers are on the retreat in the developed world; they are increasingly focused on the undeveloped and developing world to extend their market footprint. We hope that the government will hold the line and not cave in to assorted pressures. This is sensible governance and clearly to the ultimate benefit of the entire population. Smoking kills - pictorial warnings on packets may lead to fewer of us dying of tobacco-related disease; and we have scant sympathy for the tobacco lobby.