World No Tobacco Day: Promote Change and Innovation To Reduce Smoking

World No Tobacco Day, marked every year on 31 May by the WHO, is a day commemorated to spread awareness about the harmful impacts of tobacco smoking and the need to reduce smoking-related deaths.

Every year, tobacco smoking is responsible for over 8 million deaths worldwide and over half a million deaths in the Southeast Asian region alone. Almost one in three men aged 15 and above in middle and low-income Asia-Pacific countries and territories reported to smoke tobacco daily in 2017, as compared to one in four in high-income countries.

Sixty percent of the world’s smokers live in this region, and almost half the global deaths from smoking occur here. Asia is also home to nine in every ten users of smokeless tobacco, leading to high rates of oral cancer. In several countries there, public health is severely undermined where governments either control or have a significant stake in domestic tobacco companies.

While tobacco control programs solely focus on reducing the demand for tobacco, tobacco harm reduction strategies need to be included in the fight against smoking to achieve an overall reduction of smoking-related deaths and diseases.

There is currently a massive gap between the number of people using dangerous tobacco products and those using safer nicotine products in Asia. By embracing opportunities offered by safer nicotine products, there will be potentially game-changing health gains for the region.

It is time that governments and policymakers across the Asian Region legalise and regulate economically viable, safer nicotine alternatives for their millions of smokers looking to quit.