CEO of the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), Mrs. Delese Mimi Darko, has charged people to cease Shisha smoking, stating that“just one hour of Shisha use is equivalent to smoking about 200 cigarettes.”
She noted that eight million people globally die from using tobacco products, deaths that could have been prevented.
“Let us acknowledge the stark reality before us: tobacco stands as one of the foremost perpetrators of preventable death worldwide, claiming over 8 million lives annually. It’s a public health crisis that spares no one, particularly our children,” she said.
The CEO’s speech, delivered by the Deputy CEO for Corporate Services Division, Mrs. Yvonne Nkrumah, on Friday in Accra to mark World No Tobacco Day, highlighted that a Global Youth Tobacco survey conducted in 2017 revealed that 8.8 percent of students used tobacco products, including shisha, while 8.5 percent turned to Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems like e-cigarettes and vapes.
World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) is an annual event observed on May 31 worldwide to highlight the harmful effects of tobacco and other tobacco products on health.
The theme for this year’s commemoration is “Protecting Children from tobacco industry interference.”
The event, organized by the FDA in partnership with the Ministry of Health (MoH), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), and Vision for Alternative Development-Ghana (VALD), aimed to raise awareness about the tactics used by the tobacco industry to attract children and adolescents.
Mrs. Darko noted that, the tobacco industry, with its “insidious marketing strategies, preys upon our youth, ensnaring them in a web of addiction and suffering.”
Earlier, Deputy Minister of Health, Mr. Alexander Akwasi Acquah, announced that through the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Project 2030, a 5-year National Tobacco Control Strategy had been successfully developed and is currently being implemented.
He noted significant progress in enhancing inter-agency coordination, revising the smoke-free policy, and implementing and enforcing the ban on tobacco advertising.
Dr. Alex Kombat, Head of the Research Unit at GRA, stated that Tobacco Excise Tax Revenue increased from Ghc 66.98 million in 2017 to Ghc 936 million in 2023. However, it costs the country GHȻ668 million annually to combat tobacco use.