Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Alliance for Sustainable Tobacco Control (ASTC), a coalition of civil society organisations (CSOs), has urged the government to support the smoking cessation programmes in the province. While addressing a press conference, Zartasha Abid, Programme Officer for Blue Veins, urged the provincial government to adopt a comprehensive and successful population-based approach for assisting with cigarette cessation and health education campaigns for long-term tobacco control.

She said according to 2018 figures from the Ministry of National Health Services, about 23.9 million adults in Pakistan use tobacco in some way, which results in the deaths of about 160,100 people each year. She stressed that a complete public health strategy is necessary to implement, support, and promote stigma-free, easily available cessation treatments.

Pakistan joined the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2005 and has since been taking proactive measures to comply with the FCTC, Zartasha added. According to Ammara Iqbal, a psychologist and an ASTC member, civil society groups are prepared to assist the government in creating an efficient tobacco-cessation programme.

She noted that a variety of web-based programmes may be implemented to provide individuals with more opportunity to stop and to make sure the material is consistently updated to reflect best practises. Youth rights advocate Usman Afridi asserted that it is now imperative to limit the incidence of smoking and smokeless tobacco usage in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to him, the government must include targeted programmes and schemes in the health department's Annual Development Plan (ADP) and set aside enough funding for that purpose.

In order to improve the health of the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by reducing the prevalence of smoking, Zahoor Ahmad, a member of the ASTC, stated that increasing the availability of smoking cessation services such as helplines, online and offline programmes, and counselling services, particularly for populations with a high prevalence of smoking, is a prerequisite.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk