Only four nations doing enough to stub out smoking: WHO

Only four nations doing enough to stub out smoking: WHO

GENEVA: Only four countries -- Brazil, Mauritius, the Netherlands and Turkey -- have adopted all the anti-tobacco measures recommended in the fight against the "deadly scourge" of smoking, the World Health Organization said Monday.
. In a fresh report, the UN health agency urged countries to scale up their use of recognised measures to reduce tobacco use, including enforcing advertising bans, plastering health warnings on cigarette packages, raising tobacco taxes and providing assistance to those who want to quit.
It said Mauritius and the Netherlands had now joined Brazil and Turkey in implementing all of its recommended measures.
WHO said 5.6 billion people, or 71 percent of the world population, were now protected by at least one tobacco control measure -- five times more than in 2007.
The health agency said the global rate of the prevalence of smoking had dropped from 22.8 percent in 2007 to 17.0 percent in 2021.
Without this decline, there would have been 300 million additional smokers now, the WHO said.