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Tobacco Control Front and Center at International Conferences

Since Saturday, thousands of cancer experts and advocates have been swapping strategies for reducing the burden the disease takes around the world. Now, they're honing in on the single greatest threat to public health and cancer control: tobacco.

Wednesday marks the beginning of the 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health, an American Cancer Society (ACS)-sponsored event intended to celebrate progress in the area of tobacco control and share new ways of preventing the harm tobacco use causes. The conference opens on the same day the 2006 World Cancer Congress ends, and many delegates will be attending both events.

Tobacco was a key topic of discussion during the World Cancer Congress, too. Organizers released the second edition of The Tobacco Atlas, a comprehensive look at tobacco consumption, production, and marketing around the world, and an assessment of tobacco's impact on public health.

The atlas is produced by the ACS in cooperation with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and the International Union Against Cancer (UICC).

Many of its findings are grim and highlight the need for renewed tobacco control efforts around the world. A few examples:

• Tobacco use will kill 1 billion people in the 21st century if current smoking trends continue. Around 100 million people died because of tobacco use in the 20th century.
• Nearly 1 billion men and 250 million women around the world currently smoke cigarettes.
• About 650 million smokers alive today will eventually die from tobacco use.
• Every year, tobacco kills 5 million people worldwide.
• About 300 million lives could be saved over the next 50 years if global cigarette consumption among adults could be cut in half.

The atlas also contains important information about smoking among young people. Right now 1 in 7 kids between age 13 and 15 smokes, it says. And while boys are still more likely to smoke than girls are overall, rates are about equal in many countries, and in some countries girls have outpaced boys.

Keeping kids away from cigarettes is important because the younger someone is when they start smoking, the more likely they are to keep smoking into adulthood.

The topic will have special relevance for American delegates to the conference because of recent bad news about youth smoking in the US. The CDC reported last week that smoking rates among high school students remained stable between 2003 and 2005. Up until then, they had been dropping.

The authors of the report, which appeared in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report find several possible explanations for this development, including smaller increases in tobacco taxes in recent years, less funding for tobacco control programs and counter-advertising, and a dramatic rise in tobacco company spending on promotion -- from $5.7 billion in 1997 to $15.2 billion in 2003.

Curbing tobacco industry advertising is a key provision of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first global treaty to tackle tobacco use. It also calls for members to beef up warning labels on cigarette packages, enact clean indoor air laws, raise tobacco taxes, and reduce tobacco smuggling, among other measures.

As of last month, 131 countries had ratified the treaty, meaning they are bound to follow its requirements. The United States is not one of them. ACS chief executive officer John Seffrin, PhD, has urged the Bush Administration to send the treaty to the Senate so that a ratification vote can take place.

Delegates to the tobacco conference will discuss the impact of the treaty, as well as strategies for getting more countries to ratify it, and ways to implement its requirements.

Citation: "Cigarette Use Among High School Students -- United States 1991-2005." Published in the July 7, 2006Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (Vol. 55, No. 26: 724-726). Authored by the Office on Smoking and Health, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.