This volume utilizes the work initiated and executed under a recent major public health initiative, the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA), which was sponsored by the Canadian government's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) with funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The program was conceived to illuminate the factors that will facilitate the reform of major public health policies, particularly, but not limited to, tobacco. The results, presented in this volume, are an important contribution to the literature on global public health and international development, and comprise the most comprehensive evidence-based analysis of tobacco policy in the African region.
The bulk of the world’s tobacco is produced in low- and middle-income countries. In order to dissuade these countries from implementing policies aimed at curbing tobacco consumption (such as increased taxes, health warnings, advertising bans and smoke-free environments), the tobacco industry claims that tobacco farmers will be negatively affected and that no viable, sustainable alternatives exist. This book, based on original research from three continents, exposes the myths behind these claims.
This volume utilizes the work initiated and executed under a recent major public health initiative, the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA), which was sponsored by the Canadian government's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) with funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The program was conceived to illuminate the factors that will facilitate the reform of major public health policies, particularly, but not limited to, tobacco. The results, presented in this volume, are an important contribution to the literature on global public health and international development, and comprise the most comprehensive evidence-based analysis of tobacco policy in the African region.
The report examines in detail the two primary strategies to provide health warnings: labels on tobacco product packaging and anti-tobacco mass media campaigns. It provides a comprehensive overview of the evidence base for warning people about the harms of tobacco use as well as country-specific information on the status of these measures.
The fact that tobacco ingestion can affect how people feel and think has been known for millennia, placing the plant among those used spiritually, honori?cally, and habitually (Corti 1931; Wilbert 1987). However, the conclusion that nicotine - counted for many of these psychopharmacological effects did not emerge until the nineteenth century (Langley 1905). This was elegantly described by Lewin in 1931 as follows: “The decisive factor in the effects of tobacco, desired or undesired, is nicotine. . . ”(Lewin 1998). The use of nicotine as a pharmacological probe to und- stand physiological functioning at the dawn of the twentieth century was a landmark in the birth of modern neuropharmacology (Limbird 2004; Halliwell 2007), and led the pioneering researcher John Langley to conclude that there must exist some “- ceptive substance” to explain the diverse actions of various substances, including nicotine, when applied to muscle tissue (Langley 1905). Research on tobacco and nicotine progressed throughout the twentieth century, but much of this was from a general pharmacological and toxicological rather than a psychopharmacological perspective (Larson et al. 1961). There was some attention to the effects related to addiction, such as euphoria (Johnston 1941), tolerance (Lewin 1931), and withdrawal (Finnegan et al. 1945), but outside of research supported by the tobacco industry, addiction and psychopharmacology were not major foci for research (Slade et al. 1995; Hurt and Robertson 1998; Henning?eld et al. 2006; Henning?eld and Hartel 1999; Larson et al. 1961).
"Surveillance is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data essential to the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health practice. It is closely integrated with the timely determination of data to those responsible for prevention and control. The atlas visualizes a decade of work in establishing the Global Tobacco Surveillance System (GTSS), which has become the largest public health surveillance system ever developed and maintained. The atlas documents the components of the GTSS, which include the monitoring of tobacco use and tobacco control measures among youth, school personnel, health professions students and adults. It maps the coverage of the surveys and provides data on the various elements of a comprehensive tobacco control strategy outlined in the Who- FCTC and MPOWER policy. It illustrates the importance of enhancing country capability to develop, implement and evaluate tobacco control programs though and a systematic framework. This resource will be invaluable to policy makers, public health practitioners, scholars and students interested in tobacco control." - p. 9
Tobacco consumption continues to be the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products - specifically cigarettes, cigarette tobacco, roll-your-own tobacco, and smokeless tobacco - to protect public health and reduce tobacco use in the United States. Given the strong social component inherent to tobacco use onset, cessation, and relapse, and given the heterogeneity of those social interactions, agent-based models have the potential to be an essential tool in assessing the effects of policies to control tobacco. Assessing the Use of Agent-Based Models for Tobacco Regulation describes the complex tobacco environment; discusses the usefulness of agent-based models to inform tobacco policy and regulation; presents an evaluation framework for policy-relevant agent-based models; examines the role and type of data needed to develop agent-based models for tobacco regulation; provides an assessment of the agent-based model developed for FDA; and offers strategies for using agent-based models to inform decision making in the future.
This new volume of the IARC Handbooks of Cancer Prevention in Tobacco Control presents a critical review and evaluation of the evidence by 25 international experts from twelve countries on the economics, epidemiology, public policy and tobacco control aspects of tax and price policies. The working group draws conclusions about the effectiveness of tax and price measures to control tobacco use in the population. The Handbook covers an overview of tobacco taxation; industry pricing strategies and other industry initiatives diluting the effects of taxes on consumption; tax, price and aggregated demand for tobacco, as well as demand at the individual level in adults, young people and the economically disadvantaged; tax avoidance and tax evasion and the economic and health impacts of tobacco taxation. This body of evidence and the consensus evaluation of 18 concluding statements on the impact of interventions to increase the price of tobacco products, can assist policy makers, government officials, evaluators and researchers working in tobacco control and disease prevention, to base their decisions on the latest scientific evidence.
The report "Monitoring tobacco use and prevention policies" tracks the status of the tobacco epidemic and interventions to combat it. The report finds that more countries have implemented tobacco control policies, ranging from graphic pack warnings and advertising bans to no smoking areas. About 4.7 billion people - 63% of the world's population - are covered by at least one comprehensive tobacco control measure, which has quadrupled since 2007 when only 1 billion people and 15% of the world's population were covered.
