World Conference on Tobacco or Health, Mumbai, 2009

One of the advantages of improvements in information technology is that many conferences are now being made freely available on the internet. I’ve previously highlighted the excellent presentations on smoking cessation that are freely available from the website of the UK National Smoking Cessation Conference
( http://www.uknscc.org/ )

But today I’d like to recommend the website of the 14th World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH), which took place in Mumbai, India, in March 2009. I was not able to attend this conference myself, but I was very pleased to find that many of the presentations were videod and are available online with video, audio and the full slide presentation that was used at the conference. The WCTOH is intentionally comprehensive in its approach to tobacco control, and so includes many presentations on things like tobacco taxation, smoke-free air legislation, advertising restrictions, tobacco smuggling, educating kids about tobacco, data on health risks of different tobacco products etc etc. However, in recent years this conference has also included excellent presentations on smoking cessation and the latest research on what may help smokers to quit.

I had a look at the conference website and found it to be very user-friendly. One simply clicks on the “program” icon, selects a date, and then views the list of presenters and topics that were made on each day. Most have a little “movie camera” icon and if you click on that you will soon see a small video plus audio recording of the presentation, plus a larger scrolling picture of each slide.

There were too many fascinating talks to mention in detail here, but just focusing on those with a cessation theme, I particularly liked the session on “The Future of Smoking Cessation” which took place on March 10th. The presentations on genetic aspects of smoking cessation and pharmacotherapy, by Professor Tyndale from Canada and Professor Manufo from the UK were fascinating and may help explain why some patients do better on one treatment and others do better on another.

So if you are interested in watching some of the world experts on tobacco and health presenting their latest material, I recommend a visit to the website for this excellent conference: http://www.14wctoh.org/