Tobacco: A Global Threat

"Sir John Crofton was a wonderful man and he became a mentor of mine. He is the one who actually figured out how we should treat tuberculosis and basically get everybody cured. He wrote not only standard textbooks of lung medicine but also a very simple low-cost text that became the guide for doctors and other healthcare workers around the world on how to treat lung disease. He then turned to tobacco and wrote this book. I had been transitioning from working on tuberculosis to working on tobacco and I had spent maybe a year working on tobacco before I ran across this book. It’s only about 120 pages and it’s just wonderful because it’s so simple and clear. In just a few pages you get all the essence of what it takes to confront the tobacco epidemic, the tobacco threat. Tobacco is a terrible problem. I had a very active correspondence with Sir John over many years. I brought him to India because there was some resistance to the tuberculosis recommendations at the World Health Organization. As a British knight he had a lot of cachet with the Indian medical professionals and he was able to be very helpful there. We became friends and communicated regularly. A couple of years ago I gave the Crofton Lecture and in that talk I showed that Sir John had laid out all the essential aspects of how to reduce the tobacco threat in a simple letter to me a few years before the global community put this together. This is a book I wish every healthcare worker and everyone who cares about saving lives would read. One of the things Sir John notes is that it’s been said that a doctor who smokes is worth $100,000 to the tobacco industry. So getting every healthcare worker around the world to quit and to be an advocate for tobacco control is essential. The book also shows how important it is that we limit the ability of the tobacco industry to do marketing and promotion, which get kids addicted before they reach the age of maturity. It’s just a wonderful book about the burden of tobacco and what to do about it. I’m afraid the answer is human behaviour. Microbes are really tough and we have real challenges in front of us, including the spread of antimicrobial resistance. But even that is largely the result of human behaviour – we haven’t safeguarded antibiotics as we should have. This is a good segue to the last of the books."