Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today we take a look at the status of efforts to end tobacco use around the world.

Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Joanna Cohen, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Tobacco

Control, about where smoking rates stand, why there have been recent setbacks in banning the

sale of menthol cigarettes in the U.S., and why a pioneering ban on new smokers in New Zealand has been scrapped.

Let's listen.

Joanna Cohen, thanks so much for joining me.

Lovely to be with you, Stephanie.

So today I want to talk about efforts to slow smoking rates around the world. And I wanted to start by asking you sort of,

what does the global picture look like? Well, on the positive side, we have seen smoking rates

going down across the globe. Even in China, there's been some progress. There's been a lot of effort, though, that has gone into reducing those smoking rates. And all that effort is based on evidence-based strategies that have been developed from research. So we know how effective increasing tobacco taxes are. We know how effective clean indoor air or smoke-free public

places are for helping to reduce smoking and death and disease from smoking. And reducing

advertising and promotion of these deadly products is also really effective. And with the World Health Organization's

Health Treaty called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which lays out all of these

evidence-based strategies, countries have adopted that and are implementing these policies,

and that's why we're seeing the reductions in smoking rates across the globe.

But there's a flip side.

Definitely a flip side.

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