London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Leading experts in tobacco control policy and public health have today written to the German Ambassador to Britain, Thomas Matussek, to express their concern at his government's attitude to tobacco control and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the text of which is being finalised over the next two weeks in Geneva.

Letters have been sent from the Faculty of Public Health Medicine and members of the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition (ECOHOST) and the Centre on Global Change and Health which are both based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. They are urging the German government to place the lives of millions of people before the commercial gain of the tobacco industry.

While the vast majority of countries support a strong FCTC, Germany has opposed certain measures, most notably an effective ban on tobacco advertising. Its actions have dismayed the other member states, prevented the EU taking an adequate stand on tobacco advertising and undermined the whole treaty.

Tobacco is the single largest cause of premature death in the developed world and will, as a result of the rapid expansion of the transnational tobacco companies soon become the leading cause of death worldwide. The World Health Organisation has sought to develop the FCTC, a legally binding international tobacco control treaty, in recognition that this global epidemic can no longer be controlled at a national level.

Germany's own smoking statistics reflect the inadequacy of its tobacco control strategy. At a time when smoking rates in the western world are declining, youth smoking rates in Germany are at their highest level since the mid-1980s and now rank among the highest in the developed world; one fifth of 12 to 15 year olds, one in two sixteen year old boys and 45% of sixteen year old girls are smokers.

Germany's opposition to tobacco control is long-standing and well documented., It has always opposed effective European legislation on tobacco, voted against Directives in the Council of Ministers and when effective Directives are passed, challenged them in the European Court of Justice in cases brought with the tobacco industry. Only last March, in a move that drew strong criticism from the World Health Organisation, the German Government accepted more than 11 million Euros from the cigarette industry for an advertising campaign purported to prevent children from smoking. Evidence suggests that such campaigns will, if anything, encourage youth smoking.

The letter's authors believe that by excluding an effective advertising ban in the FCTC Germany would effectively be holding the rest of the world's health hostage to its own tobacco industry-driven strategy. They argue, as they have done previously, that decisions on national policy are a mater for the German government but it is unacceptable for Germany to deny other citizens of theworld the right to health. Tobacco currently kills 4 million people annually. By 2030 that toll will rise to 10 million deaths a year with the developing world accounting for over 70% of those deaths unless effective action is taken.

If you would like to get in touch with any of the authors of the letter, please contact the London School of Hygiene's Press Office on 020 7927 2073.

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Background information:
Recent BMJ article on the FCTC: Gilmore A, Collin J. A wake up call for global tobacco control: will leading nations thwart the world's first health treaty? BMJ 2002;325: 846-7.

The World Health Organisation's Tobacco Free Initiative Website: http://www5.who.int/tobacco/page.cfm?pid=40