A tobacco product with pictorial health warning
Tobacco products in the country will now have images depicting the harmful effect of the substance on the health of users.
The Food & Drugs Authority (FDA), who announced this in a statement, said the move forms part of a new educational campaign strategy to reach out to illiterate tobacco smokers and the goal is to reduce the disparities in the health knowledge gap on tobacco use in Ghana.
The Head of Tobacco & Substance Abuse, Department of FDA, Olivia Agyekumwaa Boateng, pointed out that the campaign is a further step to motivate smokers to quit, discourage non-smokers from going into the hard-to-break habit and to keep ex-smokers from slipping back into smoking.
She observed that the pictorial health warnings (PHWs), which would be accompanied with a text in English language, would be boldly displayed on the front and back of containers of all tobacco products.
Ghana started the implementation of text-only warning on cigarettes packages in 2010.
In 2016, the Tobacco Control Measures of the Public Health Act of 2012 (Act 851) and Tobacco Control Regulations of 2016 (LI 2247) mandated tobacco industries to implement pictorial health warnings on all tobacco products packages in Ghana within 18 months after the FDA had made the source document containing the health warnings.
In April 2017, the FDA made the source documents available to the tobacco industry to work towards implementing the pictures on the cigarettes packages.
The timelines for the implementation of the PHWs as approved at a tobacco control stakeholders meeting in 2017 indicated that by October 1, 2018, the tobacco industry must discontinue sale of old tobacco products without approved graphic health warning or PHWs.
Per the implementation, Ghana joins other African countries like Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia and Senegal to have PHWs on tobacco products.
Tobacco is mostly available and used in dried and natural forms. Nicotine is the highly addictive ingredient found in tobacco.
It contains a lot of gases and toxic substances that have negative health effects on the body causing various diseases such as heart, lung and different type of cancers.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri