Tobacco Firms Busily Enticing New African Smokers (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Tobacco Firms Busily Enticing New African Smokers
by Peter Masebu, PANA Correspondent 
SENEGAL;
Date: Saturday, 5/29/99

DAKAR, Senegal (PANA) - Khady is not a football fan but she attends
weekend football league matches at Dakar's Leopold Sedar Senghor stadium,
where she distributes free cigarettes made by her tobacco company.

Interestingly, most of those who accept the ''poisoned'' present are
youths. These would likely have seen the cigarette brand's advertisements
which abound in the Senegalese dailies and elsewhere.

Lately, tobacco firms have also erected beautiful retail selling stations
at busy strategically located bus stops and other places in the seaside
Senegalese capital.

Khady's work does not always end at the stadium if there is a big
conference taking place in Dakar that weekend. As part of vigourous
marketing, her company ensures that she sells the silent killer to
delegates addicted to tobacco, a known or probable cause of some 25
diseases.

The graceful 19-year old Khady does not smoke, but takes offence when
someone tries to interfere in her work. At a football match one day, she
rebuked a journalist who called her ''the merchant of death'' for enticing
young smokers to join the 1.1 billion who were already using tobacco in
the world at the beginning of the 1990s.

Out of these, says the World Health Organization (WHO), 800 million were
in developing countries compared with 300 million in developed countries.

In documents issued ahead of this year's World No-Tobacco Day on Monday,
the WHO has expressed serious concern that smokers in most Third World
countries are not informed about how it is almost impossible to quit
smoking after being addicted to nicotine, the powerful additive contained
in tobacco.

While advertising tobacco during sports events is common in Dakar because
tobacco companies are their major sponsors, there is no attempt to
disclose the dangers posed by the chemical additives like nicotine, as
happens in developed countries like the United States.

WHO says that nicotine is the most powerful additive which chains smokers
to tobacco for life, causing lung cancer, bronchitis and emphysema as well
as raising the prospect of cardiac diseases. Those who inhale the
cigarette smoke involuntariry are faced with the same risks.

Maternal smoking is associated with miscarriages, lower birth-weight of
babies and inhibited child development while parental smoking is also a
factor in sudden infant death syndrome and respiratory illnesses,
including bronchitis, colds and pneumonia in children.

Asked why the number of smokers keeps rising in Senegal and other African
countries, a medical practitioner who spoke on the condition of anonymity
said: ''The issue is that most governments keep a blind eye to advertising
because the more cigarettes the companies sell the more tax they pay.
Consequently, the tobacco firms have become even more aggressive, erecting
selling posts all over and advertising at will.''

To reverse this trend, the WHO Director General, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland,
says in her No-Tobacco Day message that: ''Getting more smokers to quit is
the key to reducing the projected tobacco-related deaths over the next two
decades.''

WHO estimates that from 1950 to 2000, ''tobacco will have killed more than
60 million people in developed countries alone, more than died in World
War II.''

It adds that ''if current trends continue, 500 million people alive today
will be killed by tobacco.''

The UN health agency is urging governments to start reducing that by
banning tobacco advertising and promotion, the sale of cigarettes to
children and to impose health warnings on all tobacco products.

''This might be very difficult because tobacco firms are running away from
the developed world to Africa and the Third World in order to escape those
stringent rules,'' said the anonymous Senegalese medical doctor.

To enable addicted smokers willing to quit the habit, WHO is urging
governments to provide cost-effective treatment, including nicotine gums,
patches, nasal spray and inhalers as well as non-nicotine medicines such
as bupropion.

WHO is also encouraging governments to prevent involuntary inhaling of
tobacco by establishing smoke-free public places and working places.

''I think this is possible because it is increasingly becoming a reality
on most passenger planes, even in Africa,'' said the Senegalese doctor,
who doubted the likelihood of African governments embracing these
suggestions because of economic and employment concerns.

Nonetheless, while governments hesitate to take bold steps to ensure the
tobacco industry takes the health aspect more seriously, nicotine
addiction and tobacco-related death toll will continue rising, albeit
silently, with people like Khady playing her part in the process.