TE24 Health Desk:
Hardening the current tobacco control regulation, appropriate implementation of regulation and expanding the cost of tobacco and tobacco items can assist with decreasing the utilization of tobacco in Bangladesh.
“We are doing whatever it may take to control the utilization of tobacco in Bangladesh. We have proactively taken drives to change the current Tobacco Control Act,” Hossain Ali Khondoker, Coordinator (Additional Secretary) of National Tobacco Control Cell (NTCC),
Hossain Ali Khondoker said they have sent a letter to the National Board of Revenue (NBR) to build the costs of tobacco and tobacco items to beat the utilization tobacco and tobacco items down.
To bring issues to light among individuals and policymakers on the natural effect of tobacco development, assembling and use, and furthermore to uncover the tobacco business’ work to “greenwash” the destruction it wrecks; the World Health Organization (WHO) has set the subject for 2022 World No Tobacco Day, to be internationally celebrated on 31 May, as “Tobacco: Threat to our current circumstance.”
Bangladesh is the primary country which marked the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in the 55th Convention of WHO to put smoking and utilization of tobacco items on June 16 down, 2003, and started it on May 10, 2004.
Head of the state Sheik Hasina previously pronounced that Bangladesh will be a without tobacco country by 2040.
“We need to accomplish other things to completely agree with the FCTC and to diminish tobacco utilize significantly in Bangladesh to make our country sans tobacco by 2040,” the Prime Minister said while talking at the South Asian Speakers Summit on Achieving SDGs in Dhaka in January 2016.
Forty Members of Parliament (MPs) of Bangladesh have taken on a 16-point statement in Cox’s Bazar on May 20 this year. The announcement perceives the dire requirement for activity and prescribes a few critical activities to understand the Vision 2040.
Associations including National Heart Foundation Hospital and Research Institute and Progga (Knowledge for Progress) have additionally underlined reinforcing the tobacco control regulation through bringing an alteration and expanding the costs of tobacco and tobacco items.
They said the Smoking and Using of Tobacco Products (Control) Act 2005, as revised in 2013, and the Smoking and Tobacco Products Usage (Control) Rules 2006 and 2015 prompted a decrease in general grown-up smoking rates from 43.3 percent in 2009 to 35.3 percent in 2017.
The counter tobacco campaigners recommended that the showcase of tobacco items at any retail location ought to be restricted and all CSR programs by tobacco organizations ought to be denied. The offer of single sticks, unpackaged or free tobacco or more modest packs ought to be denied and the size of pictorial wellbeing alerts on all tobacco items ought to be expanded to 90 percent of the front and back surfaces of bundles, they added.
“To make Bangladesh without tobacco, we should get our childhood far from tobacco. It is important to build the cost of tobacco items and remove it from the span of youngsters,” Prof Dr Sohel Reza Choudhury, top of the Department of Epidemiology and Research at National Heart Foundation Hospital and Research Institute told the Daily Sun.
Referencing that among the SAARC nations, tobacco is the least expensive in Bangladesh and bidi-cigarettes are sold as single stick in this country, he said it is important to change the duty structure and force explicit assessment on tobacco items. Simultaneously, expanding the cost of tobacco items in accordance with expansion and per capita pay will be a successful measure.
Dr Sohel Reza said likewise, the offer of single sticks ought to be prohibited by correcting the tobacco control regulation. In outcome of such measures, teens and youngsters can not buy an entire pack and will be deterred from starting tobacco use.
Tobacco ATLAS assesses that tobacco utilize caused almost 126,000 passings representing 13.5 percent of passings from any reason in Bangladesh in 2018.
Around 1.5 million grown-ups were experiencing illnesses owing to tobacco use and almost 61,000 kids were experiencing sicknesses because of openness to handed down smoking. The gauge of the immediate medical care costs inferable from tobacco use adds up to Tk 83.9 billion every year.
“The yearly efficiency misfortune because of dismalness and untimely mortality from tobacco-related infections was assessed to be Tk 221.7 billion. The all out yearly monetary expense in this manner added up to Tk 305.6 billion ($3.61 billion), comparable to 1.4 percent of the GDP of Bangladesh in 2017-18.”
