WHO: Global Tobacco Epidemic

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), most of the world's population faces a deadly threat.

From Reuters:

In a Global Tobacco Epidemic report the WHO said smoke-free policies were crucial to reducing the harm caused by second-hand smoke, which it said kills around 600,000 people prematurely each year and causes crippling, disfiguring illness and economic losses reaching tens of billions of dollars.

The report found some progress had been made, with 2.3 percent of the world's population, or around 154 million people, newly covered by smoke-free laws in 2008. But it warned of many more early deaths if governments did not act quickly.

"The fact that more than 94 percent of people remain unprotected by comprehensive smoke-free laws shows that much more work needs to be done," said the WHO's expert on non-communicable diseases, Ala Alwan.

Scientific evidence has unequivocally established that exposure to tobacco smoke causes death, disease and disability. Over the past four decades, smoking rates have fallen in rich places such as the United States, Japan and western Europe, but they are rising in much of the developing world.

The WHO said seven countries -- Colombia, Djibouti, Guatemala, Mauritius, Panama, Turkey and Zambia -- brought in comprehensive smoke-free laws in 2008, bringing the total to 17.

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the world, killing more than 5 million people a year. A report by the World Lung Foundation in August said smoking could kill a billion people this century if trends hold.

"Unless urgent action is taken to control the tobacco epidemic, the annual death toll could rise to 8 million by 2030," the WHO report said.

This is a CRISIS!

Urgent action must be taken to avert disaster. Smoke-free policies need to be enacted now, worldwide!

From the Associated Press:

In a new report on tobacco use and control, the U.N. agency said nearly 95 percent of the global population is unprotected by laws banning smoking. WHO said secondhand smoking kills about 600,000 people every year.

The report describes countries' various strategies to curb smoking, including protecting people from smoke, enforcing bans on tobacco advertising, and raising taxes on tobacco products. Those were included in a package of six strategies WHO unveiled last year, but less than 10 percent of the world's population is covered by any single measure.

"People need more than to be told that tobacco is bad for human health," said Douglas Bettcher, director of WHO's Tobacco-Free Initiative. "They need their governments to implement the WHO Framework Convention."

Most of WHO's anti-tobacco efforts are centered on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an international treaty ratified by nearly 170 countries in 2003. The convention theoretically obliges countries to take action to reduce tobacco use, though it is unclear if they can be punished for not taking adequate measures, since they can simply withdraw from the treaty.

It's unclear whether countries can be punished for not taking adequate measures to adhere to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control?

What sort of punishment?

What's with this demand that governments implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control?

It calls for higher taxes on tobacco. I don't think that's the business of the WHO.

Will the United Nations use sanctions to punish a country that the WHO has declared isn't doing enough to manage secondhand smoke?

It's nuts.

Millions have died of malaria, directly due to bad science and environmentalism run amok, hysteria that resulted in the banning of DDT.

Why has the WHO allowed this scourge to wipe out so many people?

From an excellent 2002 editorial by Marjorie Mazel Hecht, "Bring Back DDT, and Science With It!":

The 1972 U.S. ban on DDT is responsible for a genocide 10 times larger than that for which we sent Nazis to the gallows at Nuremberg. It is also responsible for a menticide which has already condemned one entire generation to a dark age of anti-science ignorance, and is now infecting a new one.

...Sixty million people have died needlessly of malaria, since the imposition of the 1972 ban on DDT, and hundreds of millions more have suffered from this debilitating disease. The majority of those affected are children. Of the 300 to 500 million new cases of malaria each year, 200 to 300 million are children, and malaria now kills one child every 30 seconds. Ninety percent of the reported cases of malaria are in Africa, and 40 percent of the world’s population, inhabitants of tropical countries, are threatened by the increasing incidence of malaria.

The DDT ban does not only affect tropical nations. In the wake of the DDT ban, the United States stopped its mosquito control programs, cutting the budgets for mosquito control and monitoring. Exactly as scientists had warned 25 years ago, we are now facing increases of mosquito-borne killer diseases—West Nile fever and dengue, to name the most prominent.

Malaria is a preventable mosquito-borne disease. It can be controlled by spraying a tiny amount of DDT on the walls of houses twice a year. DDT is cheaper than other pesticides, more effective, and not harmful to human beings or animals.

Excuse me if I don't get too upset over the "global tobacco epidemic."

Over 60 million people and counting have died from malaria since the DDT ban in 1972.

These deaths were and are preventable.

There's no question that a political agenda and wacko environmentalists are responsible for massive suffering and tens of millions of preventable deaths. FACT.

Screw the anti-smoking laws that the UN agency wants to force on the world.

First bring back DDT and stop the utterly needless loss of life from malaria.

I wonder what global citizen Obama thinks of the global tobacco epidemic and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. As a smoker, he has actively contributed to the problem.

How many deaths has Obama personally caused due to his tobacco use?