This year’s World Smoke Free Day, which is marked around the world on May 31, takes place under the slogan “Protect children from the influence of the tobacco industry”, and that slogan is especially applicable to Bosnia and Herzegovina, considering surveys that show that in our every fourth student in the country uses a tobacco product.
Public institutions and non-governmental organizations dealing with this topic note that the official data on the number of smokers are quite outdated, but they also point out that it can be safely said that Bosnia and Herzegovina has a significantly higher rate of consumption of tobacco products than the European average.
Prof. Ph.D. sc. Aida Ramić Čatak, assistant director for medical affairs and head of the Public Health Sector of the Public Health Institute of the FBiH, in an interview with Fena, reminded that the latest study on the state of health of the adult population in the Federation of BiH from 2012 showed that 44.1 percent of the adult population in FBiH smokes.
In the analysis of the smoking habits of school children, the results of the Global Research on Smoking among School Children and Youth (GYTS), which is conducted periodically every five years in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are used.
With the support of the Federal Ministry of Health, the FBiH Public Health Institute conducted this research in 2019, and the results showed that as many as 24.4 percent of school children consume tobacco products.
The fact that 81.4 percent of the surveyed consumers of tobacco products among school children are not prevented from buying these products despite their age, Ramić Čatak warned.
Mortality and economic damage
When it comes to the impact of smoking on the health of the population, Ramić Čatak pointed out that the Institute of Public Health of the FBiH monitors the trend of morbidity and mortality related to smoking, and one of the most relevant indicators is the analysis of the trend of the mortality rate from malignant neoplasms of the bronchi and lungs, which are directly connected with smoking as the leading risk factor.
“In the period from 2013 to 2022, an increase in the number of deaths was recorded. In 2014, 831 people died from these diseases, in 2021, 1,432 people died, while in 2022, the number was slightly lower compared to the previous year: 1,037 died from malignant neoplasms of the bronchi and lungs,” warned Ramić Čatak.
From the non-governmental organization PROI, which has been working for years on improving public health policies and advocating tobacco control in BiH, we received information that the direct costs of tobacco consumption in our country, which relate to the costs of treating smokers suffering from smoking-related diseases, are estimated at an amount between 557 and 766 million marks.
There are also the indirect costs of mortality from smoking, which represent the value of human lives lost due to premature death caused by the consequences of smoking, and they are estimated at between 111 and 141 million marks, Fena writes.
