The report examines in detail the two primary strategies to provide health warnings: labels on tobacco product packaging and anti-tobacco mass media campaigns. It provides a comprehensive overview of the evidence base for warning people about the harms of tobacco use as well as country-specific information on the status of these measures.

This booklet for schools, medical personnel, and parents contains highlights from the 2012 Surgeon General's report on tobacco use among youth and teens (ages 12 through 17) and young adults (ages 18 through 25). The report details the causes and the consequences of tobacco use among youth and young adults by focusing on the social, environmental, advertising, and marketing influences that encourage youth and young adults to initiate and sustain tobacco use. This is the first time tobacco data on young adults as a discrete population have been explored in detail. The report also highlights successful strategies to prevent young people from using tobacco.

"Surveillance is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data essential to the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health practice. It is closely integrated with the timely determination of data to those responsible for prevention and control. The atlas visualizes a decade of work in establishing the Global Tobacco Surveillance System (GTSS), which has become the largest public health surveillance system ever developed and maintained. The atlas documents the components of the GTSS, which include the monitoring of tobacco use and tobacco control measures among youth, school personnel, health professions students and adults. It maps the coverage of the surveys and provides data on the various elements of a comprehensive tobacco control strategy outlined in the Who- FCTC and MPOWER policy. It illustrates the importance of enhancing country capability to develop, implement and evaluate tobacco control programs though and a systematic framework. This resource will be invaluable to policy makers, public health practitioners, scholars and students interested in tobacco control." - p. 9

This report considers the biological and behavioral mechanisms that may underlie the pathogenicity of tobacco smoke. Many Surgeon General's reports have considered research findings on mechanisms in assessing the biological plausibility of associations observed in epidemiologic studies. Mechanisms of disease are important because they may provide plausibility, which is one of the guideline criteria for assessing evidence on causation. This report specifically reviews the evidence on the potential mechanisms by which smoking causes diseases and considers whether a mechanism is likely to be operative in the production of human disease by tobacco smoke. This evidence is relevant to understanding how smoking causes disease, to identifying those who may be particularly susceptible, and to assessing the potential risks of tobacco products.

In 2021, over 350 000 individuals died from tobacco use and second-hand smoke in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Over 40% of respiratory cancers in LAC were attributable to tobacco use, and the smoking-attributable medical costs can reach up to 1.5% of GDP per year. The total social and economic costs of tobacco use significantly outweigh the tobacco tax revenue that is raised. The OECD Report “Tobacco Taxation in Latin America and the Caribbean” finds that countries in LAC have significant scope to improve the effectiveness of their tobacco tax policies and administration in order to reduce the prevalence and societal costs of tobacco use. The Report examines the trends and effects of tobacco consumption, analyses tobacco tax revenue, provides an extensive overview of tobacco tax policy design in the region, discusses the need for tobacco tax reform and offers tobacco tax policy recommendations. The Report also provides detailed information on tobacco taxation in 18 countries in LAC (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).