Industry selling 'harm'

An updated edition of the Asean Tobacco Control Atlas captures in detail the continuing battle waged by the tobacco industry against public health, according to an opinion piece by the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA) published in The Nation, Thailand.
“The good news is that countries are fighting back to protect health and save lives,” Dr. Ulysses Dorotheo, executive director of SEATCA, was quoted as saying. “The bad news is that progress isn’t fast enough.”
Among Asean countries, male adult smoking prevalence is highest in Indonesia, at 66.0 percent, and lowest in Singapore, at 21.1 percent.
All 10 Asean countries have imposed graphic health warnings on cigarette packs, and four of these countries require huge warnings: Thailand (85 percent front and back of the pack), Brunei, Laos and Myanmar (75 percent).
Singapore and Thailand are said to be in the advanced preparatory stages of requiring standardized tobacco packaging.
Tobacco tax policies have been ‘strengthened’ in Brunei, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and these have helped to reduce the affordability of tobacco products, according to the SEATCA piece.
However, cigarette prices remained affordable and relatively low (under $1 a pack) in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
The tobacco industry continued to escape stringent regulation by interfering at all levels of tobacco control policy development and implementation, because only four Asean countries – Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – had taken steps to protect their public health policies from such interference.
The tobacco industry was said to be constantly inventing new ways to sell harm through novel marketing schemes.
And tobacco companies were said to be producing electronic cigarettes and promoting them as less harmful than conventional cigarettes and as smoking cessation devices. Only four Asean countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Singapore and Thailand – had banned the sale of ‘all types of heated tobacco products, e-cigarettes, shisha and water pipes’.