Overview: Welcome to the online course on the basics of tobacco product regulation. Although tobacco use is a major public health problem, tobacco products are one of the few openly available consumer products that are virtually unregulated in many countries for contents, emissions and design features. In recent years, health authorities have become increasingly interested in the potential of tobacco product regulation to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with tobacco use. However, barriers to implementing appropriate regulation include limited understanding of common approaches or best practices, and a lack of adequate resources and/or technical capacity.

In this three part series, you will first review the basics of tobacco product regulation and international guidance (Sections 1-2), steps to assessing regulatory needs and capacity and regulatory considerations (Sections 3-4), and finally, implementation and potential challenges, novel, new and modified tobacco or related products, and testing and disclosure (Sections 5-7).

Learning objectives: By the end of this course, participants should be able to describe the basics of tobacco product regulation and how they can be applied to their country context.

Course duration: Approximately 3 hours.

Certificates: A certificate of achievement is issued to those who have completed the course material and earned more than 80% of the maximum number of points from all graded assignments.

After completing this course, should you be interested in learning about building laboratory testing capacity for tobacco product regulation, please refer to the OpenWHO course Tobacco product regulation: Building laboratory testing capacity: https://openwho.org/courses/TPRS-building-laboratory-testing-capacity