World No Tobacco Day
annual international observance on May 31
World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) is observed around the world every year on 31 May. The annual observance informs the public on the dangers of using tobacco, the business practices of tobacco companies, what the World Health Organization (WHO) is doing to fight against the use of tobacco, and what people around the world can do to claim their right to health and healthy living and to protect future generations.
The member states of the WHO created World No Tobacco Day in 1987 to draw global attention to the tobacco epidemic and the preventable death and disease it causes. The day is further intended to draw attention to the widespread prevalence of tobacco use, whose negative health effects lead to more than 8 million deaths each year worldwide, including 1.2 million as the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. The day has been met with both enthusiasm and resistance around the globe from governments, public health organizations, smokers, growers, and the tobacco industry.
WHO and World No Tobacco Day
WNTD is one of 11 official global public health campaigns marked by the WHO, along with World Health Day, World Blood Donor Day, World Immunization Week, World Tuberculosis Day, World Malaria Day, World Hepatitis Day, World Chagas Disease Day, World Patient Safety Day, World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, and World AIDS Day.
Timeline
In 1987, the WHO's World Health Assembly passed Resolution WHA40.38, calling for 7 April 1988 to be "a world no-smoking day". The objective of the day was to urge tobacco users worldwide to abstain from using tobacco products for 24 hours, an action they hoped would provide assistance for those trying to quit.
In 1988, Resolution WHA42.19 was passed by the World Health Assembly, calling for the celebration of World No Tobacco Day, every year on 31 May. Since then, the WHO has supported World No Tobacco Day every year, linking each year to a different tobacco-related theme.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “World No Tobacco Day” is annual international observance on May 31. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through World, Tobacco and annual, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q233249. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “World No Tobacco Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.