DUBLIN, IRELAND

23 - 25 JUNE 2025

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Programme Tracks

Track 1:
Addressing Tobacco Control Challenges and Future-Proofing Tobacco Control

Objectives:
Submissions should critically evaluate tobacco control progress and identify solutions for future challenges, emphasising global, regional, and local priorities.

Thematic Areas:
  1. Challenges and Priorities: Address pressing challenges related to tobacco and nicotine products, regulatory gaps, and societal norm shifts.
  2. Integration into Broader Systems: Innovative strategies for aligning tobacco control with global health, human rights, and environmental sustainability.
  3. Leadership and Advocacy: Strategies to build coalitions and cultivate leadership capacity to advocate effectively for impactful policy changes.
  4. Sustainable Funding: Innovative mechanisms (structural and policy dimensions) for funding long-term tobacco control efforts.
  5. The End Game: Roadmaps toward a tobacco-free world, highlighting multisectoral and human rights-based approaches.

Track 2:
Stopping Tobacco Industry Tactics and its Interference in Policy Making

Track Chair: Mark Hurley
Objectives:
Submissions should focus on exposing and countering tobacco industry interference in policy-making.

Thematic Areas:
  1. Tracking Industry Activities: Research on effective methods for monitoring and analysing industry strategies, including investigations of the role and implications of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and promotion of tobacco and nicotine products to subvert tobacco control progress.
  2. FCTC Article 5.3 Implementation: Innovative approaches to shield policymaking from interference.
  3. Civil Society Engagement: Collaboration between civil society and governments in combating industry influence.
  4. Legal Accountability: Frameworks for holding the industry accountable through enforcement and litigation, focusing on both civil and criminal liabilities.
  5. Youth-Targeting: Industry initiatives to target youth with tobacco and nicotine products and ineffective education campaigns, and efforts to counter them.

Track 3:
Health Consequences and Cessation

Objectives:
Submissions should explore the latest research and evidence on the health impacts of tobacco and nicotine use and innovations in cessation strategies.

Thematic Areas:
  1. Monitoring Prevalence and Product Innovations: Tools and innovative methodologies for tracking tobacco use trends and innovations in tobacco and nicotine products in the market.
  2. Implementation of Targeted-Interventions: Population-specific challenges and data-driven insights that can inform targeted interventions and scaling effective tobacco control initiatives.
  3. Health Consequences: Insights into unique and recent findings on health risks linked to tobacco and nicotine products and implications for public health responses.
  4. Comorbidities: Broader public health impacts linked to tobacco use.
  5. Cessation Innovations: Behavioral, pharmacological, and technological advancements in smoking cessation and quitting nicotine use, including case studies demonstrating impactful cessation programs.

Track 4:
MPOWER and FCTC Policies

Objectives:
Submissions should focus on advancing the development, implementation, and enforcement of tobacco control policies.

Thematic Areas:
  1. Regulatory Models: Harmonising approaches for tobacco and nicotine products.
  2. Compliance and Enforcement: Effective tools and frameworks for monitoring compliance and strengthening enforcement mechanisms, including community participation and use of technology.
  3. Policy Evaluation, Implementation and Enforcement: Monitoring and implementation innovations, and policy impacts, of key tobacco control strategies including smoke-free environments, advertising and sponsorship bans, media campaigns and health warning labels.
  4. Social Mobilisation and Public Education: Innovative approaches to leveraging media, youth engagement, and cultural adaptability, including innovative evaluation methods.
  5. Strategies to Reduce Product Attractiveness: Evaluation of approaches such as standardised packages, flavour restrictions, filter bans, including impact on consumer perception and behavior.

Track 5:
Economic Insights, Taxation, and Illicit Trade

Objectives:
Submissions should explore the economic dimensions of tobacco control, emphasising taxation and trade.

Thematic Areas:
  1. Tobacco Taxation: Impact analysis on prevalence, especially among youth and low-income populations, including modelling the potential outcomes of future tax policies.
  2. Illicit Trade: Examination of the economic and public health impact of illicit tobacco trade, and regulatory innovations and international collaborations to curb illegal markets.
  3. Economic Costs: Evaluations of healthcare expenses, lost productivity and impact on national economies (economic growth), including studies on return on investment for public health programs like tobacco cessation, funded by tax revenue.
  4. Revenue Reinvestment: Case studies on allocating tobacco tax revenues to public health initiatives, including policy advocacy for sustainable financing of tobacco control through taxation.
  5. Industry Accountability: Strategies for enhancing financial transparency and compliance with tobacco regulations, including case studies of successful accountability measures.

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WORLD CONFERENCE ON TOBACCO CONTROL 2025

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Dr. Fenton Howell

Advisory Board Member, local liaison

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

Advisory Board Chair

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.