Accra, July 1, GNA - The World Health Organization has called on governments to ban tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, and to protect women and girls against sickness and suffering caused by tobacco. It said that most tobacco advertising targets women and attempt to market its deadly products by associating the use of tobacco with beauty and liberation.

A release issued to the Ghana News Agency on Wednesday noted that the epidemic of tobacco use among girls has increased in some countries and regions, adding that women form 20 per cent of the world's smokers. It stated that half of 151 countries recently surveyed for trends in tobacco use among young people revealed that more girls used tobacco than boys.

"More girls use tobacco than boys in some countries including Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Cook Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Uruguay", it said.

It said tobacco was the leading premature cause of death as it killed more than five million people every year, and about 1.5 million of them being women.

The release noted that often, the threat to women is less from them being enticed to smoke or chew tobacco than from them being exposed to the smoke of men, adding that women formed about 64 per cent of adult deaths caused per year by second-hand smoking. It said if the ban was implemented, governments would reduce the toll of fatal and crippling heart attacks, strokes, cancers, and respiratory diseases that had become increasingly prevalent among women.