World No Tobacco Day, May 31: Urging People to Kick the Habit

Tobacco addiction is an epidemic involving the entire world. To an increasing degree, it devastates countries that can least afford its grievous price that is the three dreaded D's: disability, disease, and death; add to this lost productivity. It is unfortunate that the tobacco industry continues to place its own expansion and economic gains before the well-being of generations to come and human life itself. It proceeds and keeps up with its unilateral purpose of attaining for itself financial growth ahead of the sustainable development of struggling nations.

The aim of World No Tobacco Day is to urge countries around the world to work towards stringent control of tobacco products. Governments can start by heightening cognizance of the existence of the wide assortment of deadly tobacco products. Strict regulation should likewise aid people in getting the correct facts about tobacco products by throwing off all pretenses and revealing the reality behind these commodities.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately one third of the world's adult population are smokers. Tobacco causes death to over three million people around the world each year; about a third of these deaths currently take place in developing countries.

To deal with this alarming problem, WHO sponsors yearly a World No Tobacco Day to call attention to the grievousness of the effect of tobacco on health. Created in 1988 through a Resolution by the World Health Assembly ("...the supreme decision-making body for WHO" - http://www.who.int/mediacentre/events/2005/wha58/en/), the World No Tobacco Day is one of the four United Nations agency-related world days. Observed yearly on May 31, the World No Tobacco Day is the only noteworthy annual global activity instituted to elevate awareness of the international impact of tobacco use and advance a healthy environment that's free from tobacco.

This annual event apprises people from around the world on the perils of using tobacco, the business practices of companies manufacturing tobacco products, what WHO is actually doing in its relentless battle against the tobacco epidemic, and what people can do to claim their right to healthy living and to protect future generations.

Figures supplied by WHO show that close to forty-eight percent of men and nearly fourteen percent of women around the world smoke. It is predicted that the worldwide tobacco epidemic will cause premature deaths to some two hundred fifty million children and adolescents, a third of whom are in Third World countries. It is further predicted that in the next ten years or so, tobacco will become the leading cause of disability and death.

A study conducted by the World Bank estimates that the health care costs associated with illnesses caused by tobacco result in a global net loss of two hundred billion dollars per year, half of those losses occurring in developing countries.

These gloomy realities should help us realize that a healthy environment free from tobacco should not just be a one-day observance. Rather, it should be a year-round commitment. [Read the Original Article]