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WEEKLY
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| Unhealthy business |
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Thursday, September 24, 2009
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. We are a signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which requires more than 160 countries to use large, clear, visible and legible warnings on cigarette packs and other tobacco products. There have been written warnings on cigarette packs for years, but in a country where a majority are illiterate the tobacco industry were sanguine about printing warnings that most if its customers could not read anyway. Pictures, so the saying goes, are worth more than a thousand words – indeed they are, and graphic depictions of what is going on inside your body whilst smoking a cigarette may just cut into the (un)healthy profit margins of the tobacco barons.
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. The industry cites examples, saying that the UK, Switzerland, Romania and India all had ‘difficulty’ in publishing pictorial warnings and that in each of these cases it took two years or more from initial notification to final implementation – and we, poor tobacco producers that we are, will have had less than a year. So can we have another year? Or two? 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.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
