The World Health Organization’s (WHO) report on global tobacco epidemic, launched late on Friday, makes a special reference about India’s efforts in helping smokers quit. The National Tobacco Control Programme and the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, with support from the WHO and International Telecommunication Union’s ‘Be He@lthy, Be mobile’ initiative, implemented the mCessation programme - an initiative using mobile technology for tobacco cessation. The programme allows people who want to quit tobacco use to register by giving a missed call to a dedicated national number. The programme’s progress is monitored in real-time through an online dashboard that details the number of registrations. Till date, the programme has over 2.1 million self-registered users, the WHO report states. Dr Vinayak Prasad, who heads the WHO’s tobacco control team, told The Indian Express India launched mCessation using text messages in 2016 as part of the government’s Digital India initiative. It uses two-way messaging between the individual seeking to quit tobacco use and programme specialists providing them dynamic support. An evaluation conducted by the Health ministry found an average quitting rate of 7 per cent for both smokers and users of smokeless tobacco six months after enrollment, the report notes. When 12,000 participants in the programme were asked about their tobacco use, more than19 per cent said they had abstained over the previous 30 days, it states. Prasad said the government has recently released version-2 of the “mTobaccoCessation” platform, which can deliver content through SMS or interactive voice response in 12 languages. “The programme has shown strong outcomes in terms of health and outreach, and provides a huge opportunity to help several million tobacco users who want to quit. MCessation should be included in PHC (Primary Health Care)-level advice to enable maximum reach,” he said. The 2019 report is the seventh in a series that tracks the status of tobacco epidemic and interventions to combat it. Released on Friday in Brazil, the report states that India is the second largest consumer of tobacco products, with more than 200 million users of smokeless tobacco and 276 million consumers of tobacco overall. In 2017, a Global Adult Tobacco Survey found that 38.5 per cent of adult smokers and 33.2 per cent adult users of smokeless forms of tobacco had attempted to quit, the report notes. Only 23 countries provide cessation services at best-practice level, it states. Since 2007, the Union Health ministry is pushing to introduce stronger graphic health warnings on tobacco packets, with mixed success.
