Tracking WHO MPOWER in South East Asian region: An opportunity to promote global tobacco control

Abstract

Introduction: Tobacco use is a major public health challenge worldwide and to counter the global tobacco epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) to provide new legal dimensions for international health cooperation. Further WHO introduced the MPOWER package to monitor the tobacco control programs among the countries to accomplish the FCTC objective. Aim: The aim is to quantify the implementation of MPOWER tobacco control policies in South East Asia Region (SEAR) from the year 2008 to 2015. Materials and Methods: Information was collected from the WHO report on the Global Tobacco epidemic program SEAR from 2008 to 2015 using MPOWER. This assessment was based on the checklist which was designed previously by Iranian and International tobacco control specialists in their study on tobacco control. Results: Various countries of SEAR were ranked by scores and these scores were obtained from each indicator for each activity. Among SEAR region, Thailand got the highest scores and significant positive change was seen from a score of 8 in 2008 to 32 in 2015 where certain countries like Korea and Timore-Leste showed no significant positive change. Conclusion: Tobacco control policies have reduced the tobacco consumption, but still multisectoral efforts are needed toward effective enforcement of the law to bring about a significant decline in the prevalence of tobacco use.