As the Western Cape’s fire season picks up, there’s been an uptick in the calls received by the Stompie Hotline in Cape Town. 

The hotline takes down the guilty party’s details and helps the fire department track them down.  

South Africa’s Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has earlier this year published a new tobacco control bill which, if passed into law, will tighten the grip on how cigarettes and other tobacco products are sold, marketed and regulated in the country.

There are five key areas of tobacco control that the new bill seeks to address:

• a smoke-free policy,

• plain or standardised cigarette packaging,

• regulating e-cigarettes,

• points of sale marketing, and

• removing cigarette vending machines.

Some are addressed in South Africa’s current tobacco control law. But the country still doesn’t fully comply with the standards set by the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. South Africa signed the convention in 2005.

Smoke-free public places is one example. The current law bans smoking in public places but allows for designated smoking areas in places like bars, taverns and restaurants provided that they do not take up more than 25 percent of the venue.

The WHO’s convention calls for 100 percent smoke-free public places to protect non-smokers fully.

In line with this, the new bill calls for a 100 percent ban on smoking in public places. It will also ban the advertising of cigarettes and other products at tills or selling them in vending machines.

The bill is also significant because it attempts to regulate e-cigarettes for the first time in South Africa. To date e-cigarettes have been freely marketed and sold anywhere to anyone, including children.

There’s a great deal of evidence from the rest of the world that the planned interventions work.

Let’s start with smoke-free policies. In countries like South Korea and the US where they are in place, research shows that they led to an overall improvement in health, particularly children’s health.

Incidents of smoking-related cancers went down and there was a reduction in childhood smoking. There was also an increase in the number of smokers saying they want to quit.

E-cigarettes are still a relatively new factor. But research is already casting doubts on various claims made about them. First introduced in China in 2004 they were initially mooted as an aid to quit smoking. But research shows that they in fact encourage young people to start smoking cigarettes. And 18 studies have shown that e-cigarettes do not reduce quit rates. Instead, the latest research shows that they do the reverse – they reduce the quit rates of smokers intending to quit by about 66 percent.

There are 83 countries that regulate e-cigarettes and about 27 that have completely banned their sale. These include Brazil, Singapore, Uruguay, Seychelles and Uganda.

The advertising, promotion and sponsorship of e-cigarettes are regulated or prohibited in 62 countries.

Tobacco smoking is the single most preventable cause of death in the world. Smoking also worsens TB and HIV treatment outcomes. Yet 37 percent of South African men and 6.8 percent of South African women aged 15 years and older use tobacco .

Before the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, South Africa was a leader in tobacco control in Africa and across the world because of strong tobacco control legislation it had put in place. But the laws weren’t updated according to current WHO’s standards and the country now lags behind some other African countries.

The new legislation will place South Africa on the right path. Apart from saving millions of lives, it will ensure that South Africa fulfils its obligation as a party to the WHO convention.

eNCA