DUBLIN, IRELAND
23 - 25 JUNE 2025
For the past 57 years, the World Conference on Tobacco Control (formerly the World Conference on Tobacco or Health – WCTOH) has been the premier international forum on tobacco control. The Conference promotes global collaboration and knowledge sharing and strives for a collective resolution to fight tobacco by working together and integrating tobacco control into our health and development goals.
While a one day virtual event, the Leadership Summit on Tobacco Control, was held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last full-fledged in-person conference took place in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018. and was attended by 2,500 delegates from 125 countries. You can read the official Conference declaration here.
Since then, there have been limited opportunities for the global tobacco control community to convene, to share and discuss successes and lessons learned from countries and organisations, and to strengthen the alliance against the industry’s increasingly aggressive interference.
The first Conference took place in 1967 in New York, USA and 400 people attended the Conference representing nearly 40 countries.
Since then, the Conference has been hosted across several countries from all over the world, including cities like London (1971), New York (1975) Stockholm (1979), Winnipeg (1983), Tokyo (1987), Perth (1990), Buenos Aires (1992), Paris (1994), Beijing (1997), Helsinki (2003), Washington D.C. (2006) Mumbai (2009), Singapore (2012), Abu Dhabi (2015) and most recently, Cape Town (2018).
The change of the name of the Conference from the World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) to World Conference on Tobacco Control (WCTC) recognises the evolving landscape of global tobacco control and the ambition to end the tobacco epidemics.
Dr. Fenton Howell is medical graduate of University College Dublin, Ireland, and completed higher specialist training in Public Health Medicine in 1991. He is the former National Tobacco Control Adviser to the Department of Health, is a Clinical Associate Professor in Public Health in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at Trinity College Dublin, and is a board member of the National Cancer Registry Ireland. Dr. Fenton Howell is a Fellow of both the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of Ireland and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. He is a past Dean of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of Ireland, and past President of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, the All Ireland Social Medicine Group and the Irish Medical Organization. He has previously served on the boards of ASH Ireland, the Tobacco Free Research Institute, the European Network on Smoking Prevention, the Institute of Public Health in Ireland and the Medical Bureau of Road Safety, and he chaired the Prevention Working Group for the Ireland–Northern Ireland–United States National Cancer Institute Cancer Consortium.
Dr. Gan Quan, PhD, is Senior Vice President at Vital Strategies, where he leads the Tobacco Control Division, comprising a global team working with governments and civil society partners around the world to reduce tobacco use, the leading preventive cause of deaths worldwide. The Division has supported work in more than 50 low- and middle-income countries with a focus on evidence-based tobacco control policies and implementation, capacity building, and countering interference from the tobacco industry.
Dr. Gan Quan has more than 15 years of international experience in health system building, policy implementation, government partnership, and policy research. Prior to joining Vital Strategies, Dr. Gan Quan spent 14 years with the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union), first as Technical Advisor, then Director of China Office, and most recently as Director of Tobacco Control Department. Before joining The Union, Dr. Gan Quan was a research fellow at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at University of California, San Francisco.
