WHO's tobacco treaty linked to drop in young smokers

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-02-06 21:00

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About 24 million fewer young people are smoking as a result of the World Health Organization's anti-smoking treaty, according to international research. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control came into force in the mid 2000s, and is a set of measures to decrease smoking including regulation of products, reduction of tobacco smoke exposure and regulation of tobacco promotion. To assess the effectiveness of the treaty, the researchers compared before-and-after smoking trends in 170 countries, and they say the treaty was associated with 2 million more people quitting smoking, along with decreases in the amount of current smokers and people smoking below the age of 25. Countries that adopted the treaty while also raising taxes by at least 10% were likely to see stronger improvements, the researchers add.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Medicine

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile

Funder: We acknowledge funding from the following institutions: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (to P.J.); and the International Development Research Centre (grant no. 108442-001), Millennium Nucleus for the Evaluation and Analysis of Drug Policies and Bloomberg Philanthropies (grant no. 2022-110829) (to G.P.). We thank B. Savedoff, S. Verguet and N. Valdes for their comments, and the participants at a meeting organized by the World Bank held at Mexico City in 2022.

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