WASHINGTON, USA (CMC) – The director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), Dr Carissa Etienne, has warned about what she described as the tobacco epidemic in the Americas, including the Caribbean, saying that though the devastating health effects of tobacco use are well known, tobacco’s negative repercussions extend well beyond the obvious health outcomes.

“Tobacco consumption creates a significant economic burden on societies because of both the high costs of health care and the associated lost productivity,” said the Dominican-born Dr Etienne, writing in the s.

“In addition, tobacco use contributes to health inequalities and exacerbates poverty within and between countries, through the diversion of resources away from food and other essential needs, as well as through foregone income,” she added.

Dr Etienne said these and other adverse consequences of the tobacco epidemic disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries, where more than 80 per cent of the world’s smokers now live, including 127 million in the region of the Americas.

“Considering its tremendous health and economic costs, the tobacco epidemic has the potential to undermine both social and economic development,” she said.

Dr Etienne noted that the global response to tobacco is the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which has been ratified by 180 countries worldwide and 30 countries in the Americas.

The FCTC provides a blueprint for governments to effectively curb the tobacco epidemic by implementing specific evidence-based interventions to reduce consumption, Dr Etienne said.

These include: adopting tax and price measures to reduce tobacco consumption; banning tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; creating smoke-free work and public spaces; requiring prominent health warnings on tobacco packages; and combating illicit trade in tobacco products, she said.

These interventions Dr Etienne said, have been identified as “best buys” in the WHO Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases, which calls for a 30 per cent relative reduction in the prevalence of tobacco use by 2025.

“Of note, raising taxes has proven to be the single most potent and cost-effective strategy for reducing tobacco use,” she said, adding that there is now “clear evidence that appropriately structured tax policies can provide the dual benefit of reducing tobacco consumption, as well as generating additional tax revenues”.

The PAHO head pointed to a recent global study that found that increases in tobacco taxation in low- and middle-income countries could prevent millions of deaths while also creating new fiscal space for financing development.

But Dr Etienne said, despite the clear path forward set forth by the FCTC and abundant evidence on the effectiveness of increasing taxes to reduce tobacco consumption, taxation remains the least widely implemented FCTC measure.

She said this is largely due to industry tactics to “block, delay and weaken tobacco control policies.

“In the specific case of fiscal policies, governments often abstain from taking action because of claims propagated by the tobacco industry that higher taxes harm economies by increasing levels of illicit trade and by decreasing tax revenues,” Dr Etienne said.