Noida|Ekta Purohit
Smokeless tobacco is more dangerous and the decision taken by government of 85 percent of pictorial warning on tobacco products is remarkable said, Dr.Rajeev Mehrotra, Director, National Institute of Cancer Prevention & Research.
Prof.Rajeev was speaking at the inauguration ceremony of Global knowledge hub on smokeless tobacco on Wednesday.
The SLT (smokeless tobacco) hub of World Health Organisation hosted by Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) at the NICPR, Noida, which works under Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Through web portal and other social media communication, FCTC will generate and share expertise, information and knowledge on smokeless tobacco, and to create borderline to create reproductive health effects.
On talking about the government initiative A.K.Pusp, Director, at Health Ministry told HealthLive “Union Health Ministry work as a bridge to setting –up such knowledge hub in India.
Development of such partnerships will encourage the awareness among people he added.
This is globally the seventh WHO FCTC knowledge hub. The previous six held in Australia, Finland, Lebanon, South Korea, South Africa and Uruguay. These centres, though, work on different areas of tobacco control, like trade and litigation, surveillance, policy monitoring, illicit trade, etc.
Smokeless tobacco usage is a major issue around the world. A research paper – Prevalence of smokeless tobacco use and number of users in 121 countries – published in British Journal of Medicine & Medical Research in July 2015, says it affects over 352 million people across 121 countries. “Of these, 67% were men (232.7m) and 33% women (119.2m).
Nearly 95% of the global SLT users lived in developing countries,” said the study. D N Sinha, formerly regional advisor to WHO on non-communicable diseases and now scientific advisory committee member of NICPR, co-authored the paper. He said globally, 90.4% of SLT users live in 11 countries – India (237.4m), Bangladesh (30.9m), Myanmar (12.6m), Pakistan (10.1m), USA (9.6m), China (4.1m), Indonesia (3.2m), Nepal (2.7m), Madagascar (2.6m), Germany (2.4m) and Uzbekistan (2.4m)., “The problem of SLT is on the rise, because they are cheaper than cigarettes. There is need for awareness and higher pricing of these products.” Sinha said.
Guangyuan Liu, team leader at the FCTC convention secretariat, said It’s a information platform for interaction, discussion social awareness hosted by WHO FCTC. Further, Liu added “ Effective pricing and tax measures should be introduced to counter the problem. 
FCTC will conduct studies and create awareness to check the problem,” demand reduction measures, and the committed to do so is very good sign she added.
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