'Death clock' a grim reminder of perils of smoking
Geneva - The smoking "death clock" is running at nine people a minute - and it is ticking faster all the time.
The head of the World Health Organisation, Gro Harlem Brundtland, has urged governments to get their act together to curb millions of smoking-related deaths.
The WHO chief unveiled the "death clock" yesterday, showing that more than 13,3-million people have died from smoking-related diseases in four years.
WHO hopes an international anti-tobacco treaty will be finalised in time for adoption at the May meeting of the World Health Assembly, the UN health agency's 191-nation decision-making body.
"This treaty is about saving lives, hundreds of millions of lives," Brundtland said.
"This is an enormous burden and we need to take it seriously," she added.
"Every one of those people could have lived longer or suffered less."
The so-called Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is meant to restrict advertising and marketing, control label- ling, cut secondhand smoke and limit smuggling and thereby slow the expected explosion in cancer and heart disease.
The final round of talks focuses on a draft treaty drawn up by negotiating chairperson Luis Felipe de Seixas Correa.
Health campaigners say the draft has been gradually watered down and is now too weak to dent the rising death toll.
They claim the Brazilian diplomat caved in to pressure from the United States, Japan and Germany, which are all home to powerful tobacco company interests, and have been repeatedly accused of trying to wreck the treaty.
Tom Novotny, a former US assistant surgeon-general who headed the US delegation until 2001, said he quit as chief negotiator to protest against orders by President George W Bush's administration to weaken the text.
But US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said the United States was fully committed to a "strong and dynamic" treaty to fight the "devastating health, economic and social consequences of worldwide tobacco consumption".
The draft says countries should take measures to restrict tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship in accordance with its national constitution, saying these "may" include a total ban.
African and Asian countries are angry that the text falls short of demands by the majority of countries for a total ban on advertising. Senegal's ambassador, Ousmane Camara, told the meeting that African nations had not been consulted properly over the draft.
The US has long held out against a total advertising ban, saying it would violate its constitutional provisions on free speech.
The draft also drops an explicit reference contained in a previous version of the text to a progressive ban on sponsorship of sports and cultural events, and drops proposals to phase out vending machines.
It introduces new requirement for health warnings to take up at least 30% of a cigarette packet.
Bullsheet! This is about raising taxes on a legal product. If they want to "Save" lifes then make tobacco illegal! How about taxing liquor another 500%? Oh wait, politicians drink don't they? Logic dictates that if you raise the price of something then something else cannot be afforded.
The tobacco "Settlement" lawsuit was to go towards education programs regarding tobacco and instead states have just used it as another means of income to support infrastructure. Nice to see a shiny new fire truck going down the road knowing I have helped pay for it.
Why does every "good conservative" think he has to become an apologist for such a disgusting vice? Instead of beating the libertarian drum for tobacco (while crusading against marijuana) the Right could make the laws against smoking--a clear case of legislating morality--into a justification for more laws that enforce morality (laws against sodomy, pornography, public lewdness, etc.). But oh no. Conservatives are supposed to champion smoking. Even Cal Thomas, that born-again evangelical ethical perfectionist, toes the line against "the nanny state's" war against tobacco. I suppose he feels that the banning of tobacco ads from broadcasting is a "violation" of the First Amendment. But if we did have tobacco advertsing today (considering the decadent state of our current culture) can you imagine how pornographic they would be? Then Cal and Co. would crusade for their removal from broadcasting on moral grounds and the First Amendment would never be mentioned.
Smoking is the only vice that forces unwilling people to participate (by means of those formerly omnipresent, foul clouds of tobacco smoke). I suppose the rest of the conservative movement is happy to be identified in the public mind with this hideous and savage vice, but I am not. I'm sorry if I'm the only one who feels this way.
The war on tobacco is just about the only development in recent society I agree with. I refuse to believe that reversals in the downward spirals in other areas must be accompanied by the rebirth of near universal smoking.
Albeit expensive, it does thin the herd!
AIDS, TB and malaria kill 15,000 people a day, three-quarters of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and WHO worries about tobacco use, obesty and auto accidents, for God's sake! How many of the THREE BILLION people worldwide who don't have enough to eat worry about OBESTY? Six to fourteen MILLION of them, mostly children, will die of starvation each year according to WHO's own figures. During the four years WHO has been fiddling around with the Framework Convention on (People) Control, as many as 56 MILLION CHILDREN HAVE STARVED TO DEATH!
In 1995, 5 million babies born in developing countries died in their first month of life; 17 million died from infectious or parasitic diseases in 1996. In 1998 tuberculosis was the world's no. 1 killer of young women, according to WHO itself. Also according to WHO, AIDS is the number one killer in Africa; 3 million "children' under 24 were HIV positive in 1998--which is 6 young people being infected with the AIDS virus EVERY MINUTE, according to the U.N. Also according to WHO's own figures, there are 300-500 MILLION acute cases of malaria worldwide EACH YEAR.
Is there no one who will take on these hypocrital bastards? No one who's willing to look beyond the "smokescreen" and unmask the absolute cynical murder of millions of children worldwide because WHO is on a "moral rampage"?
I notice no mention was made in this article of WHO's "Healthy Countries Study" which shows Switzerland #8 on the scale of average HEALTHY lifespan (8 of the 10 top countries have the highest smoking rates). Japan is #1 while the nanny-heavy USA is way down at #24.