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Extinguished cigarettes in an ashtray of ash and cigarette butts.
Stakeholders in the Health industry have been making submissions to the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill in Parliament.
The public hearings are taking place before the Portfolio Committee on Health.
A consultant in sustainability and public health and a former director of Action on Smoking and Health in the UK, Clive Bates has supported tobacco harm reduction for more than two decades.
He presents the committee with some figures.
“The first thing to say is smoking is still overwhelmingly the problem, worldwide, around 800 million people die annually. That’s roughly similar to the number of people who died annually in 2020 and 2021 from COVID. It’s on a comparative scale of premature mortality, along with COVID, but of course it goes on every year, not just during the period of that epidemic.”
