Only four nations doing enough to stub out smoking: WHO

GENEVA: Only four countries -- Brazil, Mauritius, the Netherlands and Turkiye -- have adopted all the anti-tobacco measures recommended in the fight against the “deadly scourge” of smoking, the World Health Organisation said on Monday.

In a fresh report, the UN health agency urged countries to scale up their use of recognised measures to reduce tobacco use, including enforcing advertising bans, plastering health warnings on cigarette packages, raising tobacco taxes and providing assistance to those who want to quit.

It said Mauritius and the Netherlands had now joined Brazil and Turkiye in implementing all of its recommended measures. WHO said 5.6 billion people, or 71 percent of the world´s population, were now protected by at least one tobacco control measure -- five times more than in 2007.

The health agency said the global rate of the prevalence of smoking had dropped from 22.8 percent in 2007 to 17.0 percent in 2021. Without this decline, there would have been 300 million additional smokers now, the WHO said.

“Slowly but surely, more and more people are being protected from the harms of tobacco,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, adding that his organisation was eager to support national efforts to “protect their people from this deadly scourge”.