World Health Organization's New Guidance On Tobacco Product Regulation

On March 09, 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched new guidance on "Tobacco product regulation: Building laboratory testing capacity51", and a collection of country approaches for regulation of menthol, presented in the publication titled "Case studies for regulatory approaches to tobacco products - Menthol in tobacco products52". This guidance was launched on the occasion of World Conference on Tobacco or Health held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Tobacco product regulation - Building laboratory testing capacity

This guidance provides practical and stepwise approaches to implementing tobacco testing. Such guidance is relevant to a wide range of countries in various settings, even those with inadequate resources to establish a testing facility. Tobacco use is a global health burden. However, despite the devastating effects of tobacco use, only a handful of countries currently regulate tobacco products, including on how the product is made, the contents of the product and emissions from tobacco products during use, to which users and bystanders can be exposed.

This is partly due to the challenges associated with the regulation of tobacco products, highly technical nature of this policy intervention and the difficulties in translating science into regulation. Failure to regulate represents a missed opportunity as tobacco product regulation, in the context of comprehensive control, is a valuable tool that could complement other tried and tested tobacco control interventions, such as raising taxes, smoke-free environments, etc.

The new tobacco laboratory guide is a useful resource for countries, and provides regulators and policymakers with comprehensible information on how to test tobacco products, what products to test, and how to use testing data in a meaningful way to support regulation. Further, it provides a step-by-step guide to developing a testing laboratory, using an existing internal laboratory, contracting an external laboratory, and making use of the available support mechanisms both within WHO and externally.

Case studies for regulatory approaches to tobacco products - Menthol in tobacco products

The publication complements the 2016 advisory note on menthol, published by the WHO Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation (TobReg), which sets out the available evidence on prevalence and health effects of menthol in tobacco products, as well as evidence-based conclusions and recommendations for policy-makers and regulators...

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