In the fight against tobacco consumption, Germany is one of the problem children of the World Health Organization (WHO) and one of the tail lights in Europe. “We cannot really understand why politics in Germany is so lax in implementing tobacco control measures,” said Rüdiger Krech, WHO Director for Health Promotion, of the German Press Agency.
On the other hand, the WHO reported worldwide progress on Monday. More and more countries took action against smoking. According to the new report on the tobacco epidemic, 5.6 billion people now live in countries that have implemented at least one of the measures recommended by the WHO to protect nonsmokers. These include: drastic warnings against smoking on cigarette packs, advertising bans, smoking bans in public places and high taxes on tobacco products. The world’s most widespread anti-tobacco measure are disgusting pictures on packages: there are now regulations for this in 103 countries with 4.5 billion inhabitants.
According to the WHO, several elements are missing in Germany: “The last price increases for cigarettes are below the inflation rate and ultimately make smoking cheaper, not more expensive,” emphasized Krech, who comes from Hamm in North Rhine-Westphalia. The smoking ban in restaurants is a patchwork quilt, the advertising ban is only poorly implemented.
There are still smoking rooms
“Neither nationwide nor in any of the 16 federal states is smoking completely prohibited by law in all eight facilities that we are looking at,” said Krech. These are: health and educational institutions, universities, public buildings, workplaces, restaurants, pubs and public transport.
Unfortunately, the Workplaces Regulations 2004 and the Protection from the Hazards of Secondhand Smoke Hazards Act 2007 still permitted smoking rooms in some establishments. Only 4 of the 16 federal states would have completely banned smoking in health care facilities. A complete ban on smoking has also not been enacted in public transport.
Narcotics Officer: Biggest preventable health hazard
The federal drug commissioner Burkhard Blienert announced that he would step up his efforts against tobacco consumption. “We need to do more to discourage people from starting to smoke in the first place,” Blienert said, according to a statement from his house. With more than 127,000 tobacco-related deaths per year in Germany alone, tobacco consumption is still the greatest avoidable health risk of all. About 90 percent of all lung cancer cases were caused by smoking. Since the corona pandemic, more people have been using cigarettes and e-cigarettes again. Blienert spoke out in favor of certain bans, including on advertising directly at the point of sale and on sponsorship of festivals by the nicotine industry.
According to WHO data, the proportion of smokers is declining worldwide. Without protective measures, they estimate that there would be 300 million more smokers. According to the WHO, 1.3 billion people use tobacco (to smoke, chew or snuff) and more than eight million people die from tobacco consumption every year worldwide. Among them are 1.2 million non-smokers who die from passive smoking, including 65,000 children.
Highest standards in Brazil and Turkey
The WHO is also skeptical about e-cigarettes: “E-cigarettes do not contain tobacco, but they are harmful to health and not safe,” it writes on its website. However, it is still too early to give a definitive answer as to the long-term effects of consumption.
For a long time only two countries had the highest standards for a tobacco-free world: Brazil and Turkey. Two more have been added since the last report in 2021, WHO reported: Mauritius and the Netherlands. However, the WHO points out that it only examines the legal situation for this survey, but not the implementation in the country. 87 percent of the countries have provided for fines in the law if smoking bans are violated. But less than a third fund the monitoring of the ban.
In Germany there are unnecessarily many deaths from smoking, said Krech. This is one of the main causes of failures in the health system. Effective prevention would ensure that fewer people would get cancer, cardiovascular diseases or respiratory problems from smoking and would have to go to the hospital.
