The World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) is observed around the world every year on May 31 to draw global attention to the widespread prevalence of tobacco use and its negative health effects, which currently leads to 5.4 million deaths worldwide annually.
The World Health Organization (WHO) selects “tobacco industry interference” as the theme of World No Tobacco Day 2012. Tobacco use is one of the leading preventable causes of death. The global tobacco epidemic kills nearly 6 million people each year, of which more than 600,000 are people exposed to second-hand smoke.
According to an estimate, it will kill up to 8 million people by 2030, of which more than 80 percent will live in low- and middle-income countries.
Medical research made it clear during the 1900s that tobacco use increased the likelihood of many illnesses including heart attacks, strokes, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), emphysema and many forms of cancer.
The member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) created World No Tobacco Day in 1987. In the past twenty years, the day has been met with both enthusiasm and resistance across the globe from governments, public health organizations, smokers, growers, and the tobacco industry. World No Tobacco Day primarily focuses on encouraging users to refrain from tobacco consumption and its related products for a period of at least 24 hours.
It is intended to encourage a 24-hour period of abstinence from all forms of tobacco consumption across the globe. It focuses on the need to expose and counter the tobacco industry’s brazen and increasingly aggressive attempts to undermine the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) because of the serious danger they pose to public health. On World No Tobacco Day 2012, and throughout the following year, WHO will urge countries to put the fight against tobacco industry interference at the heart of their efforts to control the global tobacco epidemic.
