GENEVA, Switzerland – The United Nations health agency has signaled that tobacco might be reaching burn-out among Caribbean men, predicting that two decades of increasing tobacco use around the world are set to go into reverse.
Smoking is on the wane.“For the first time, the number of tobacco users is declining worldwide,” DrRuedigerKrech, director of the Department of Health Promotion at the World Health Organization (WHO), told journalists in Geneva last month.
In 2018, there were slightly more than a billion males using tobacco around the world, “over 40 million more than in the year 2000,” he said. “But now, for the first time, we are seeing declines in use, with WHO projecting that there will be at least two million fewer men using tobacco in 2020, and five million less by 2025,” he added.
‘SHIFT’
Describing the development as a “powerful shift in the global tobacco epidemic” in view of the fact that more than four in five smokers are male, Dr. Krech said that it mirrors “consistent reductions” by 100 million women since the turn of the century.
Showing that tobacco use can be reversed should also give Caribbean and other governments confidence that they can meet the global target of a 30 percent reduction in tobacco use by 2025, the WHO official maintained.
Despite the positive trend, however, he warned that the world is not on track to meet this target, noting also that more than eight million people die from tobacco use every year – about half of its users. In addition, WHO said most tobacco-related deaths occur in low and middle-income countries, such as those in the Caribbean – areas that are targets of intensive tobacco industry interference and marketing.
