MORE than three decades since the world, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), started observing World No-Tobacco Day in 1987, smoking remains a major health problem, blamed for so many illnesses such as lung cancer.
The harmful effects of tobacco smoking are well documented. It is blamed for the death of seven million people around the world each year, mostly from direct tobacco use and around 890,000 from exposure to second-hand smoke.
Tobacco smoke is said to contain thousands of chemicals, 69 of which are known to cause lung cancer and chronic respiratory disease. Tuberculosis has also been linked to exposure to the chemical components of tobacco.
The Philippines is one of the world’s top 15 countries with the highest burden of tobacco-related illnesses. It has been a party to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control since 2005. It took a big step in the campaign against smoking when Congress appoved RA 10643, the Graphic Health Warning Law, in 2014.
More recently, the Philippine government, led by the Department of Finance and the Department of Health, launched a one-two punch against smoking, with an increase in excise taxes and the filing of criminal complaints for non-payment of these taxes and use of fake internal revenue stamps. Boxing champion Sen. Manny Pacquiao joined the campaign with a video showing him knocking out cartoon character “Yosi Kadiri.”
There is also the move for e-cigarettes to help in ending tobacco smoking, following studies that these are 95 percent less harmful than conventional cigarettes, and much more effective than nicotine replacement therapy. Public health experts attending the fifth Global Forum on Nicotine in Poland in June, 2018, said it is the tar and the poisonous gases in cigarette smoke that are harmful to health, not nicotine. These alternative products, it is hoped, will can help smokers quit and thus have a better quality of life.
The important thing is there is that tobacco smoking itself be reduced with all possible means – higher taxes, an educational campaign warning youth against its health hazards, and helping those who have fallen into the tobacco habit to end it. We join millions of others around the world in these efforts as we celebrate World No-Tobacco Day today.
