The World Health Organization (WHO) is urging governments to prepare for plain packaging of tobacco products as part of a comprehensive approach to tobacco control aimed at reducing smoking which, it said, kills millions of people each year.

“Strip back the glamour and glossy packaging that contain tobacco products, and what is left? A product that kills almost six million people every year, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said in her message marking World No Tobacco Day being observed today.

Arguing that tobacco packaging is a form of advertising and promotion that often misleads consumers and serves to hide the deadly reality of tobacco use, Dr Chan said the WHO’s tobacco control strategy includes the use of graphic health warnings and comprehensive bans on advertising, promotion and sponsorship.

“We do this for a very good reason: plain packaging works,” Dr Chan said. “New evidence from Australia, the first country to fully implement plain packaging, shows that changes to tobacco packaging there led to over 100,000 fewer smokers in Australia in the first 34 months since implementation in 2012.”

The evidence, she said, “tells us that plain packaging reduces the attractiveness of tobacco products. It restricts tobacco advertising and promotion. It limits misleading packaging and labelling. And it increases the effectiveness of health warnings.”

According to Dr Chan, the evidence explains why plain packaging was included in guidelines to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC).

“It also explains why governments, like those in Australia, France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom have passed plain packaging laws,” she said.

“The strength of this evidence has been rigorously tested, including recently in the High Court of England and Wales, which rejected all 17 of the industry’s challenges to the UK plain packaging law. In doing so, the court stated that some of the tobacco industry evidence was ‘wholly untenable and resembled diatribe rather than expert opinion’. This decision came in the same week that arbitrators revealed that they refused to hear a Philip Morris claim against the Australian law on grounds that the company had engaged in an abuse of process in bringing the claim,” the WHO director-general said.

These results, she said, are a cause for celebration, but governments must remain vigilant.

“We have seen over and over again how industry, fuelled by its deep pockets, has been able to develop new strategies in an attempt to protect profits generated from its deadly products. In the case of plain packaging, it has been the target of a massive tobacco industry misinformation campaign dating as far back as 1993,” Dr Chan said, pointing out that the WHO stood up against the campaign, replacing falsehoods with the facts.

She said that, while plain packaging represents a power tool for tobacco control, it also builds upon other measures that governments have at their disposal to curb tobacco use. As such, the WHO has recommended that plain packaging be used as part of a comprehensive multisectoral approach to tobacco control.

“On this World No Tobacco Day, we are telling the world to get ready for even more comprehensive tobacco control,” she said. “Get ready to further accelerate implementation of the WHO FCTC. Get ready to improve global health, reduce premature deaths from noncommunicable diseases like cancers, heart and lung disease, and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. And get ready for plain packaging.”