Harm Reduction Recognised Crucial For Reducing Tobacco-Inflicted Health Burden.

Noting the lack of any significant reduction in smoking prevalence worldwide through the years, two public health experts and former World Health Organization officials, Professor Robert Beaglehole and Professor Ruth Bonita, have called for a review of WHO's existing tobacco control policies, urging inclusion of harm reduction for addressingthe health burden caused by tobacco use effectively.

In a recent correspondence published in The Lancet titled 'Tobacco control: getting to the finish line', the two health experts highlighted that four out of five of the world's smokers are in low-income and middle-income countries. In these countries where most of the eight million deaths caused by tobacco occur each year, rates of tobacco use are falling quite slowly. The case is same elsewhere as the number of smokers globally has barely changedsince the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) policies were implemented 17 years ago.

They are of the view that the missing strategy in WHO and FCTC policies is harm reduction.

Harm reduction is an essential public health strategy that works on reducing harm from harmful substances where abstinence is not a viable option. The same strategy is gaining popularity in tobacco control efforts as well as many scientific studies and public health experts have identified it as an efficient method to reduce harm to adult smokers' health who would otherwise continue to smoke.

Most people smoke because of nicotine. While nicotine is not risk-free, it is not the main culprit behindthe harms of cigarettes. Instead, scientific evidence shows that it is the cigarette smoke that contains over 6000 toxic chemicals, 100 of which are proven to be the cause of majority of...