United Nations Radio

Tobacco Free Initiative

WHO is launching an initiative to help Africa strengthen its tobacco control efforts. With the help of a 10 million dollar grant from Bill Gates Foundation for the next 5 years, the health agency will assist African governments to enforce five basic measures under the WHO Framework Convention for tobacco control. UN Radio's Patrick Maigua gets the details from Dr. Armando Peruga, Programme Manager of the WHO Tobacco Free Initiative.

Duration: 2'33''

PERUGA: The tobacco epidemic right now is producing a number of chronic diseases that complicate quite a lot the level of health of Africa. We tend to think of Africa as a region with infectious diseases, malnutrition, that is true but if you look at the statistics you see that chronic diseases are already 25% of the total mortality and if you look at men of productive age that burden reaches 50% so, one out of two deaths that are in many cases related to tobacco.

MAIGUA: What specific measures will this initiative put in place?

PERUGA: The initiative we want to put in place with the collaboration of the governments in Africa are basically five measures which are the creation of smoke-free environment, the offering of services to treat tobacco dependents, the warning of people through media of the dangers of tobacco, the enforcement of advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco products and finally the increase of tobacco taxes.

MAIGUA: Is it that governments have not been putting much attention to these efforts?

PERUGA: Well, they are beginning to put attention to it, and we want to assist them in continuing this trend.

MAIGUA: How stringent anti-tobacco laws in Africa and is this some of the areas that you are going to be focusing on?

PERUGA: We want to support everyone that wants to make an effort to improve the protection of people from the dangers of tobacco. And we will collaborate with the government in making the legislation, especially in smoke-free areas, as well as enforcing advertisement ban, providing health warnings in tobacco packages, we want to assist them in making these laws even better.

MAIGUA: How prevalent is tobacco use in Africa and what is its impact in health services?

PERUGA: The tobacco it's an epidemic in Africa. Perhaps compared to other regions of the world the prevalence is not that high, but precisely because of that it's a great opportunity to begin to stop the epidemic at the very beginning and to avoid that the tobacco becomes a fill blown epidemic of the size of HIV or tuberculosis in Africa. Africa cannot afford to have so many epidemics going on at the same time.

PRES: Dr. Armando Peruga speaking to UN Radio's Patrick Maigua.

(duration: 2'33")