On October 17th, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a new partnership: the Mobile Health Partnership (mHealth) whose goal is to use mobile technology, and text messaging (SMS) to spread awareness among the population and help to combat non-transmitted diseases such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory illnesses as well as common risk factors, such as smoking, poor diets, lack of physical exercise and alcohol abuse.
The World Smoke-Free Day 2012 campaign was centered on the interference of the tobacco industry and focused on the need to report and counteract the industry’s efforts to undermine the World Health Organization Framework Agreement for the Control of Tobacco (FACT), the first international public health treaty that obliges Member States to apply a series of policies and measures to reduce tobacco consumption and protect populations from smoke exposure.
“As part of the world system of vigilance against smoking, we have used mobile telephones to gather information about tobacco consumption in 17 countries which make up over half of the world’s population. This experience of implementing projects using mobile technology throughout a population will be of vital importance to the Initiative,” said Dr. Oleg Chestnov, Vice-director General for Non-transmitted Diseases and Mental Health at the WHO. Smokers are two times more likely to quit if they receive SMS text messages that encourage them to meet their objective of going smoke-free, compared to those who receive messages without this motivation, a British study revealed.
The tobacco industry is using predatory marketing strategies to hook young people to their addictive drug,” said Dr. Douglas Bettcher, Director of the WHO Smoke-Free Initiative. “But complete bans on advertising are effective and reduce tobacco consumption by 16% in the countries that have adopted such a legislative measure.” “Half measures don’t work,” Dr. Bettcher added. When a type of advertisement is banned, the tobacco industry just transfers its enormous resources somewhere else. We exhort governments to impose a complete ban to break up the tobacco marketing network,” he stated.
