Tobacco.org

• Brazil and tobacco use: a hard nut to crack 

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.

Jump to full article »