The Asia-Pacific region has the world’s highest number of tobacco users, and a leading health expert says harm reduction is essential to saving millions of lives.
Speaking at an Aug. 17 webinar hosted by the Asia Forum on Nicotine (AFN), Professor Tikki Pang, a former director for research policy at the World Health Organization (WHO), called for a new approach to tobacco control.
Nancy Loucas, executive coordinator of the Coalition of Asia-Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA), said the scale of the problem is staggering.
“The fact is that Asia-Pacific, specifically Asia, has the highest number of global tobacco users. The number is staggering. It is 781 million people. That represents 63 percent of the global total of people who use tobacco,” she said.
Loucas criticized the agenda for the upcoming WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) conference in November, arguing it wrongly dismisses harm reduction as being driven by the tobacco industry.
Pang said the FCTC itself includes harm reduction. “Despite the fact that Article 1 of the convention implicitly includes harm reduction as a component of tobacco control, there is a failure to acknowledge and support the use of safer alternative tobacco products as an important strategy and tool to end smoking,” he said.
He noted that 130 million people are already using alternative products, despite what he called the WHO’s “very strong anti-tobacco harm reduction stance.”
“The WHO, FCTC and the COP have adopted a very strong anti-tobacco harm reduction stance, actually stating that these products are as harmful as combustible cigarettes and calling on its member states to ban them,” Pang said.
Globally, around 8 million people die annually from smoking-related causes, with the majority in low- and middle-income countries. “The Asia-Pacific region bears a very significant burden of these harmful effects of smoking,” Pang said.
Instead of waiting for the WHO to change course, Pang urged stakeholders to form evidence-based platforms, citing the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) as a model.
He said he has been “struck by the support the cause has received from many quarters,” including former WHO colleagues, academics, and consumer groups.
Pang quoted Alex Wodak, an Australian harm reduction advocate, who said, “WHO’s position on this issue is now as irrelevant as the position of governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s on the future of central command economies. WHO’s position will collapse at some point, but I don’t know when.”
