WHO launches tobacco awareness kit for school-aged teens
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To mark World No Tobacco Day on Sunday, May 31, WHO launched a new toolkit for teens aged 13 to 17 years that focuses on protecting them from being exploited by the tobacco industry.
According to WHO, each year the tobacco industry invests more than $9 billion in advertisements for its products, specifically targeting youth with nicotine and tobacco products, especially with newer technology such as e-cigarettes.
During a virtual panel, WHO Director of Health Promotion Ruediger Krech, DrPH, MPH, said 16.8% of young people use e-cigarettes, compared with 1.5% of adults.
“There is huge potential for the tobacco industry to hook our young people onto tobacco smoke,” Krech said.
WHO’s campaign this year will focus on protecting youth from exploitation tactics through the toolkit. Consisting of classroom activities, educational videos, quizzes and homework assignments, the toolkit will expose tactics that the tobacco industry uses to attract a younger audience, the organization said.
“The tactics are very mean by the tobacco industry, and very targeted toward different countries,” Krech said. “We have 44 million children and adolescents smoking at the moment, and what we know is that we used to have 20 million cigarette smokers, so that [total] is covering everything.”
According to WHO, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the tobacco and nicotine industry has been persistent in pushing products that limit a person’s ability to fight the SARS-CoV-2 infection and recover from it. The industry has offered branded masks for free and free home delivery, even lobbying for products to be deemed “essential.”
“There are a couple of things that you need to run your daily business to survive and that are ‘essential’ services,” Krech said. “If you want to say that tobacco is an essential service — we don’t understand [that]. South Africa, for instance, challenged that, and said that tobacco was not essential and were sued by the tobacco industry. These are the tactics that play into this.”
There are over 40 million youths aged between 13 to 15 years who have already begun using tobacco.
Representing 6,500 pupils a part of Students Working Against Tobacco, youth representative Nicholas Martinez, a 17-year-old high school junior, addressed the panel on why he feels so strongly against tobacco use.
“I have seen kids as young as 10 [smoking], which is pretty, pretty young,” said Martinez, who called in from his high school in Miami. “I could never imagine [myself] at that age smoking or using e-cigarettes. But these kids are 10 and 11 and are actually starting to smoke. It’s a very common thing now.”
In an effort to reach a younger audience, WHO has launched the #TobaccoExposed challenge on TikTok, and welcomed social media partners such as Pinterest and YouTube.
"Adolescents and young people have the power to serve when they understand the intention of this industry, an industry that really wants to hook onto an addictive behavior just in order to keep [selling] their products, even if it goes against public health," Adriana Blanco Marquizo, MD, MA, head of the convention secretariat for WHO’s Framework Convention and Tobacco Control, said during the virtual panel.
WHO called on all sectors to join in helping to stop marketing tactics from tobacco and nicotine industries that target youth. It said:
- Schools should refuse any form of sponsorship and prohibit representatives from nicotine and tobacco companies from speaking to students.
- Celebrities and influencers should reject all offers of sponsorship.
- Television and streaming services should stop showing tobacco or e-cigarette use on-screen.
- Social media platforms should ban the marketing of tobacco and tobacco-related products, as well as prohibit influencer marketing.
- Government and financial sectors should divest from tobacco and tobacco-related industries.
- Governments should ban all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship.
WHO said countries can protect children from industry exploitation by putting strict tobacco control laws in place. This would include regulating products like e-cigarettes, which have already reached the younger generation. – by Ken Downey Jr.
Disclosures: Krech, Martinez and Marquizo report no relevant financial disclosures.
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