A new report, No Fire, No Smoke: the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction Report 2018, maps for the first time the global, regional and national availability and use of safer nicotine products (SNP), the regulatory responses to these products, the public health potential of tobacco harm reduction, and the right to access SNP.
The report, written by Harry Shapiro and published by Knowledge Action Change, which describes itself as a private-sector agency for public health, was launched today in Geneva where the eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is being held this week.
In a press note announcing the report’s launch, the team behind it said that every six seconds someone died from a smoking-related disease and that this problem was likely to worsen.
The steep smoking declines in richer countries were slowing while in financially-poorer countries smoking was set to rise.
‘Existing forms of tobacco control are proving insufficient,’ the note said.
‘There is substantial international, independent evidence that safer nicotine products could lead to a global revolution in public health.
‘Time is way overdue that countries and international organizations support tobacco harm reduction and safer nicotine products…’
Summaries of the report in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese are available to download at https://gsthr.org/report/summary, and more languages are due to be added.
THR map shows the way
