Better Health For All

By Hamira Sultan, Consultant in Public Health and Member of FPH’s Pakistan SIG

On March 20th, FPH’s Pakistan Special Interest Group (SIG) sent two open letters to the PM of Pakistan, and the Chief Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court pledging our support to help improve tobacco control in the region.

The chair of our SIG, Prof Zafar Iqbal, initially peer reviewed a paper looking at a cross sectional study of smoking prevalence in urban and rural areas of Pakistan. Through this, he connected with the author (Haleema Masud) and identified an opportunity to undertake some advocacy work around tobacco control.

Zafar contacted me in August 2017 to invite me to help support this advocacy work. I was 6 months into my maternity leave and ready to use my brain! Zafar is a great networker and put me in touch with a range of people with an interest in smoking-related health in Pakistan. I spoke with them all about their views on how best we advocate for tobacco control and started to draft a letter to the Pakistani PM in November 2017.

We were keen to get support from colleagues in Pakistan as well as the UK to help enforce our messages. The secretary for the Pakistan SIG, Mohammed Jawad, introduced me to Professor Javaid Khan from the Aga Khan University who has led a range of advocacy work regarding tobacco control. He was key to our decision to write to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for Pakistan in asking for his support in implementing various tobacco control legislation that Pakistan has passed. Our letters have also been signed by our President of FPH, and academics in Pakistan and the UK.

We thought it was important to take this on given the level of harm that tobacco causes in Pakistan, being responsible for over 110,000 deaths per year . Our letters highlight this and acknowledge that Pakistan has made progress in passing legislation around smoke free places and size of pictorial graphics on cigarette packs. However, more needs to be done to ensure these laws are fully implemented, and importantly that taxation of cigarettes is a priority. Our letters come at a time when tobacco taxation is being cut by the Pakistani government. Our letters have made the Pakistani press which we hope will keep the issue of tobacco control in the country a priority.

Changing public opinion and national policy can take a long time. The FPH Pakistan SIG is considering the next steps of the campaign.