Pakistan: Anti-tobacco Panel to Contact Election Candidates

Source from:  The News International 04/01/2013

The 54-member Coalition for Tobacco Control-Pakistan (CTC-Pak) has decided to contact national and provincial assembly candidates during their election campaign for advocating ban on smokeless tobacco on the floor of the House after their election.

The decision was made during the 4th national coordination meeting of CTC-Pak here. The meeting was also attended by the representatives of Tobacco Control Cell and World Health Organisation, who praised CTC-Pak members from all provinces of the country for their contributions to anti-tobacco initiative.

CTC-Pak, a coalition of more than 160 civil society organisations, is advocating for application of tobacco control policies and laws on smokeless tobacco ('gutka', 'paan', 'naswar' etc) at federal and provincial levels also as consumption of smokeless tobacco is resulting in an alarming rise in number of multiple oral, throat and chest cancer patients in Pakistan. The participants agreed to proactively approach the candidates in their respective work areas with precise information material to include this important public health agenda in the political parties' programmes. They also stressed the need of pressure groups from the communities who would constantly keep a follow up with the candidates by bringing up the issue of smokeless tobacco in the meetings during the election campaign. "We have very high hopes and expectations with the civil society in this regards since it was the civil society in the first place who introduced the issues of tobacco control in the country that are now implemented as smoking tobacco control laws. If you did it once, you can do it again," said Shahzad Alam, National Programme Officer of WHO.

"We appreciate CTC-Pak and its members for providing us with the technical support in Government's efforts for enforcement of tobacco control laws by raising awareness on various tobacco control issues through activities in their areas," Dr. Zia Uddin Islam, Deputy Project Director, Tobacco Control Cell commented.

"We expect our public representatives to raise the health hazardous issues of smokeless tobacco in the national and provincial assemblies and play their role to formulate appropriate policies and make laws in this regard. Since the provinces are now empowered to formulate their own policies so it is our duty to help the candidates to realise their public health responsibilities towards their voters for taking effective measures against production and sale of smokeless tobacco," said Khurram Hashmi, the National Coordinator, CTC-Pak. The members of CTC-Pak also shared experience of their workings in the meeting and suggestions were made on how civil society organisations can be more effective in spreading the message on district and union council level. Enditem