Every year, over eight million people die owing to deaths caused by tobacco accounting for economic burden of US$1.4 trillion spent on health care and lost productivity.
Over the years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has been spearheading varied global awareness campaigns and coupled with traditional nicotine replacement methodologies, yet the number of smokers has remained over a billion since 2000.
So, the question is ‘Is WHO really doing enough to truly help adult smokers around the globe quit’.
This year, WHO launched a year-long campaign for World No Tobacco Day’s (WNTD) on the theme of “Commit to Quit”. The campaign aims to empower 100 million tobacco users to quit by attempting to create networks of support and increased access to services to help tobacco users quit successfully. The initiative includes scaling existing services such as advice from health professionals, national toll-free quit lines as well as services like Florence, WHO’s first digital health worker, and chatbot support programmes on WhatsApp.
The ugly truth remains that such initiatives rarely help smokers quit.
ETHealthWorld – 2021-07-15.
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