More people will die from smoking unless harm reduction is embraced-public health experts
There are a billion plus smokers in the world today and 50 percent which is about five hundred million of them will die from smoke related complications, unless we do something, Dr Andres Milton, Current Chair of the Snus Commission in Sweden, and Former Chairperson of the World Medical Association has said.
Dr Milton says forbidding everything that has to do with tobacco is wrong and that it is a matter of urgency for all to embrace harm reduction which is aimed at assisting addicted smokers and not recruiting new smokers.
Dr Milton said this during a recent webinar on the ‘framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Challenges and Prospects for the World Health Organisation WHO’, recently moderated by Formiche Editor Giorgio Rutelli.
In Africa however, governments are yet to prioritise harm reduction through regulation with experts advising that such policy needs to be guided by science and not emotions or religious beliefs as people are dying from tobacco related disease everyday.
Smokers who cannot quit have been advised to use smoke free products which have reduced risks compared to combustion tobacco which is responsible for most deaths related to smoking.
Perhaps the continent and specific countries, Malawi inclusive can pick lessons from the success stories of countries such as Sweden in this area.
In Sweden, Snus, a moistened smokeless tobacco product has been around for over 100 years and experts argue that this has helped lower complications such as lung cancer and other diseases that are associated to tobacco use.
Dr Milton says different Swedish governments have put in place rules against smoking in public and that with snus, 5 percent of women smokers use it while 17 percent of men have embraced it daily.
Dr Milton explains that had more countries in the region adopted snus in the last forty years or so, The European Union EU would have been recording 350,000 less deaths from tobacco related lung cancer complications per year.
“So it is quite heavy you know. And as you know, when the European Union is talking about beating cancer, they don’t talk about smoking at all. We try to get that in the picture but they don’t want to talk about that. All these authorities are influenced by the debate against smoke free products that forbid everything to do with cigarettes,” he adds.
He says in the case of Sweden, snus has helped a great deal in reducing lung cancer among both men and women smokers as it does not give cancer while smoking does.
Dr Milton explains that while smoking makes people to be dependent on nicotine, snus does not, adding that for years, the number of people who use snus in Sweden is about the same as those using cigarettes in other European countries, but that the difference is that in Sweden, they do not die early because they use a smoke free product.
“When we look at the figures of Sweden where 17 percent of the men use snus daily, it’s about 23 percent of the male population that use nicotine daily. It’s about the same as in many other European countries but in Sweden they do not die early. You live with the snus but you die from cigarette smoke. That is because smoke will give you cancer, but snus will not,” he says.
He advises authorities across the world to be open to smoke free products saying they can be used anywhere, compared to cigarettes which have restrictions in public places.
He says people need to be helped so that they do not die from cigarette smoking and they should be told the truth through the statistics that are already in public domain.
Meanwhile, Marewa Glover, Professor at the New Zealand Public Health Academic specializing in Smoking Cessation at The University of Auckland says believing that nicotine causes diseases associated with smoking, or having doubts about nicotine can deter people from using risk reduced nicotine containing products.
Professor Glover says literature shows that the absorption of misinformation about nicotine has put people off using smoke free products, and that this is a major barrier to the adoption of risk reduced nicotine products which will hamper efforts to eliminating smoking related diseases.
New Zealand has done a case study, which recruited a diversity of people aged between 17 and 91 years old who said they did not want to stop smoking.
Data was extracted from participants in New Zealand who talked about smoking harms and causes, and how the damage occurs.
Professor Glover says some doubted the messages against smoking as they had known people who smoked for years and did not develop the diseases being warned about.
She says it is for this reason that misinformation against nicotine needs concerted effort to handle as most participants actually expressed distrust about the public health messages by authorities.
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