Participation by leaders of less developed countries in all FCTC events will be more expensive after the next COP, according to this announcement following COP-4. Before travel assistance was introduced to delegates from poorer countries in 2000, participation by their leaders was very limited.
The announcement ends with a recommendation to lobby their government representatives for a reversal of this policy to ensure maximum participation of leaders of poor countries.
It is difficult to see how the FCTC can really be an immediate benefit to countries that struggle to afford an airfare to attend an international conference. There are more immediate demands on every health budget in the world than tobacco control: tobacco control is a blunt instrument hacking clumsily at a single factor among the myriad causes of non-communicable diseases.
2 comments:
Just take it from our pockets
I'm quite sure that our taxpayers will find their taxes scuttling, under plain cover over in their direction.
Hey, can't they just take it from the £11 billion in tobacco tax we pay each year?
'There are more immediate demands on every health budget in the world than tobacco control...'
Well said. That is what I find so horrendously immoral, Belinda. I am tired of reading that smoking is the world's leading preventable cause of death.
No it isn't.
Starvation, malaria, diarrhoea, and unassisted childbirth are still leading causes of death at paleolithic but preventable levels in many parts of the world. Malnutrition, poor housing and poverty are rife in the developed world and are also known factors. Wars are notorious for causing preventable deaths.
Oh, and our own NHS appears to starve a large number of our own people to death, when it isn't killing them off through uncontrolled infections or medical error. All preventable.
I get so angry sometimes.
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