PHA-Exch> Billionaires Back Antismoking Effort

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Vern Weitzel <vern.weitzel at gmail.com>
crossposted from: "[health-vn discussion group]" health-vn at cairo.anu.edu.au


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/health/24tobacco.html?_r=1&ref=health&oref=slogin

Billionaires Back Antismoking Effort


Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced their
half-billion-dollar pledge in Midtown on Wednesday.

The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco will kill up to a
billion people in the 21st century, 10 times as many as it killed in the
20th.

This time, most are expected to be in poor countries like Bangladesh and
middle-income countries like Russia. In an effort to cut that number, Mr.
Bloomberg's foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top
of a $125 million gift he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.

Since 1999, the Gates Foundation has spent more than $2 billion on AIDS
programs and about $1.2 billion on malaria. Mr. Gates has just left his
Microsoft post for full-time foundation work and said he intends to form
partnerships with other philanthropists.

The announcement was made at a joint news conference at TheTimesCenter in
Midtown Manhattan attended by foundation staffers and foreign students
enrolled in a tobacco control program at Johns Hopkins University that is
supported by Mr. Bloomberg. He has campaigned against smoking for years, but
this is a new direction for the Gates Foundation.

Thanking Mr. Gates, Mr. Bloomberg said, "I'm an optimist, but I'm also a
realist."

"All the money in the world will never eradicate tobacco," he added. "But
this partnership underscores how much the tide is turning against this
deadly epidemic." The new donations far outstrip current spending of about
$20 million a year on antismoking campaigns in poor and middle-income
countries, according to a recent W.H.O. report.

The $500 million would be spent on a multipronged campaign — nicknamed
Mpower — that Mr. Bloomberg and Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the health
organization, outlined in February. It coordinates efforts by the Bloomberg
Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, the World Health Organization, the World
Lung Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the
foundation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

It will urge governments to sharply raise tobacco taxes, prohibit smoking in
public places, outlaw advertising to children and cigarette giveaways, start
antismoking advertising campaigns and offer people nicotine patches or other
help quitting. Health officials, consumer advocates, journalists, tax
officers and others from third world countries will be brought to the United
States for workshops on topics like lobbying, public service advertising,
catching cigarette smugglers and running telephone help lines for smokers
wanting to quit. A list of grants is at tobaccocontrolgrants.org.

Dr. Richard Peto, an Oxford epidemiologist who leads studies on the effects
of smoking in the developing world, called the announcement "excellent
news."

"I reckon this will avoid tens of millions of deaths in my lifetime and
hundreds of millions in my kids' lifetimes," he said.

Catherine Armstrong, a spokeswoman for British American Tobacco — one of the
Western tobacco companies that focuses on sales to the third world — would
not comment directly on the new initiative. But she said, "We have no
problem with government organizations educating people on the risks of
tobacco."

A spokesman for Philip Morris, which makes Marlboro, the world's most
popular cigarette brand, said the company agreed that children should be
kept from smoking but thought that raising cigarette taxes promoted
smuggling and counterfeiting.

Mr. Bloomberg, founder of the financial news company bearing his name and
creator of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, has long been known for his
antipathy to tobacco. During his administration, New York has adopted
several antismoking measures, including a ban on smoking in bars and
restaurants, and significant increases in cigarette taxes.

The global campaign promises to be a struggle. Cigarettes not only are
highly addictive and supported by huge advertising campaigns, they are also
an important source of income for many foreign governments. In China and
other countries, tobacco is a state-owned monopoly, and low- and
middle-income countries collect $66 billion a year in tobacco taxes.

Only about 5 percent of the world's countries have any antismoking measures
like those the campaign envisions. But Dr. Peto said antismoking campaigns
were already having some effects, even in countries where no-smoking signs
are often ignored. He surveyed thousands of tobacco users in China in the
1990s — "before the government was taking it seriously," he said — and found
4 percent who identified themselves as former smokers. Now, he said, 20
percent do.

In India, where people have long chewed tobacco but widespread smoking is
more recent, Dr. Peto said he found almost no one who had quit. "India is
where China was in the mid-1990s," he said.

Smoking is not widespread in most of Africa, where only about 20 percent of
men smoke, and Mr. Gates said on Wednesday that he hoped to prevent a surge
in smoking there.

Waves of lung cancer deaths — which typically begin about 40 years after
smoking takes hold in a society — help convince the next generation that
smoking is dangerous, as in the United States in the 1960s, Dr. Peto said.
And, he added, "When doctors and journalists start to take it seriously,
things start to change."

The Gates Foundation's main focus has been global health, but up until now
it has concentrated mostly on infectious diseases. Mr. Gates said he had
been "looking at" tobacco deaths but was unsure what to do. "We were
thrilled when Michael and his experts took the lead," he said.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20080724/ea40e185/attachment-0001.html>