The Kenyan Government has announced that spine-chilling images of throat cancer tumours and rotten teeth are to appear on cigarette packets before 2012, intended to shock smokers out of the habit.
Findings show that the enlarged health warnings that manufacturers put oncigarette packets over the past two years have had little effect. Only two per cent of middle-aged Kenyans are kicking the smoking habit every year, according to government research.
Source: FCA Bulletin 109, article by John Muchangi on page 2 (here in pdf format)
According to the Kenya National Tobacco Control Action Plan, the number of smokers in the country has risen,increasing cases of tobacco-related diseases like cancer. Annual cigarette consumption in Kenya has increased to about one billion sticks a year, says the new five-year tobacco control plan, launched by the country’s director of non-communicable diseases, William Maina.
The figure is based on last year’s Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, which concluded that 19 per cent of men and two per cent of women are smokers.
“The war is not against the tobacco growers, manufacturers or smokers,”Mr Maina said. He said the government is keen to reduce the burden that tobacco-related diseases impose on the economy.
Leading cigarette maker BAT says the 2007 Tobacco Control Act, which allows the government to introduce stringent regulations, was already “choking” the company. BAT chairman Evanson Mwaniki also says the company faces increased discrimination, although it is engaged in a legal business and is among the top taxpayers in Kenya.
Since 2008, the government has threatened to force cigarette makers to carry images of dying cancer patients on packets. Such measures have taken a long time to come into effect, however, despite Kenya having signed the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2004. WHO says that including pictures on cigarette packets has worked “miracles”in countries that have implemented it.
Canada was the first to introduce pictorialwarnings, in 2001. Research a year later found that 31 per cent of former smokers said the images had motivated them to quit, while 27 per cent said the images discouraged them from taking up the habit.
Graphic images are now included as part of tobacco product packaging in Australia,Brazil, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Venezuela, Thailand, Uruguay and the UK. (Why forget Mauritius and Djibouti?)
Kenya’s Tobacco Control Board chairman, Peter Odhiambo, who was involved in developing the new five-year plan, has said the Board will also push tobacco farmers to adopt alternative crops. The plan also commits the government to establish anti-tobacco clinics in 30 percent of the country's health clinics.
John Muchangi
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