The cigar, a lethal legal drug

• April 25, 2024

More than 6 million people die annually due to some disease related to tobacco consumption in the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

If preventive measures are not established at this time, and trends continue along with population growth, this mortality will rise to 8 million by 2030, mainly impacting the middle and lower income nations.
 

In this way, tobacco consumption has become a major epidemiological and economic burden for countries, due to high medical care costs and huge losses in terms of productivity, said the doctor. Luz Myriam Reynales, head of the Tobacco Research Department of the National Institute of Public Health.
 

"In Mexico, 17.3 million smokers live, who are waiting to receive medical services related to tobacco use. The damages to the health that they will present in the medium or long term, will generate costs, both to themselves and to the family, to the health service providers and, consequently, to the government. "
 

During a conference given at the Faculty of Medicine of the UNAM, the specialist explained that if a family does not have social security and has someone with a disease related to tobacco use, the economic burden will arise when resources are sought to address the condition and that person stops generating income for the family .
 

"Most of the morbidity and mortality is between 35 and 65 years old, and there is a large part of the population that is still economically active; it works and generates income and progress for the country. Then, from the labor point of view, if we start to lose these people, this will affect us to a large extent economically ".
 

The costs of smoking have become important arguments to promote public policies. Dr. Luz Myriam Reynales explained that the developed countries have already taken the WHO Framework Convention very seriously, generating actions to reduce or stabilize the consumption of cigarettes.

However, in the countries of medium and low income there are no well-structured public policies, and the tendency is for people to smoke more.
 

He called for breaking this vicious circle by establishing public policies, such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which reaffirms the right of all people to the highest possible level of health.
 

"It is necessary to improve the state of health of our population, because with it the expenses that will be saved in the attention to diseases related to smoking could be reassigned to other essential goods; besides that it would help to reduce the catastrophic health expenses and destine them to the productivity of the country ".
 

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