• 5/31/2005
  • Manila, Philippines
  • Christina I. Hermoso
  • The Manila Bulletin Online (www.mb.com.ph)

The country joins the rest of the world in today’s observance of World No-Tobacco Day which highlights the ill-effects of tobacco on the body. In the Philippines, statistics showed that 16.5 percent of the population are smokers with women constituting nearly half of the total figure.

Smoking is the single biggest preventable cause of death.

Tobacco claims 4.9 million lives a year, and if the present consumption patterns continue, the number of deaths will increase to 10 million by the year 2020, 70% of which will occur in developing countries.

There are an estimated 1.3 billion smokers and half of them (some 650 million people) are expected to die prematurely of a tobacco-related disease.

At the current rate, the number of smokers will rise from today’s 1.3 billion to 1.7 billion by 2025.

The Philippines Department of Health (DoH), which leads in the observance, has issued a warning on the long-term effects of cigarette smoking.

“Chemicals in tobacco smoke include nicotine and tar which get deposited in the bronchi and the lungs. The other harmful chemicals are acetone, ammonia, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide, methane and benzopyrene which are also considered as major contributory factors responsible for smoking-related diseases,” said the DoH.

“Long-term smoking has been linked to various health problems and has been found to aggravate existing health conditions,” the DoH said.

Long-term effects of cigarette smoking, according to health authorities, include:

1. Nicotine Addiction.

2. Coronary artery diseases — smoking has been found to be responsible for more than 20 percent of deaths.

3. Heart disease — Smokers in their 30s and 40s have a heart attack risk five times higher than non-smokers.

4. Hardening of arteries and complication of blocked arteries, hypertension and blood clots.

5. Stroke — a pack of cigarette a day increases the risk of stroke 2 1/2 times.

6. Peptic ulcer.

7. Lung diseases — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) like chronic bronchitis and emphysema. In the 1990s, smoking accounted for 85,000 of COPD-related deaths.

8. Cancers — Smokers are prone to oral cancer as well as cancer of the respiratory tract, oral cavity, nose pharynx, larynx, lung, cervix, urinary bladder, kidneys and pancreas. Eighty percent of all cases of lung cancer are smoking-related.

9. Diseases of the oral cavity — irritation and infection of the teeth and gums and

10. Delayed healing of wounds.

In women, long-term smoking has been found to cause reproductive disturbances (infertility) and problems during pregnancy like fetal abnormalities and even death and low birth weight in infants.

Asia tightens ban on smoking but manufacturers still search for openings

Hong Kong – Asian governments are tightening antismoking laws around the region, but that has not prevented giant tobacco companies from searching out new markets.

As the world marks international No-Smoking Day Tuesday, Asian authorities, emboldened by the successful implementation of bans in Europe and the United States, are broadening the scope of existing curbs and mulling wide-ranging new prohibition laws.

Manufacturers, however, continue to exploit poor health awareness in countries like China and Indonesia, which have seen increased investment by tobacco firms.

Asia accounts for an estimated half of the world’s 1.4 billion smokers, with the World Health Organization calculating that 50,000 teenagers take up the habit each day.

Smoking’s huge cost to national health budgets have motivated wealthy nations such as Australia and New Zealand to implement bans on smoking in public places.

Other nations are taking their lead. Taiwan in March, for instance, took the first step towards an anti-smoking policy with proposed fines for pregnant women caught lighting up.

“Once momentum is set in one country you usually find others follow,” said Anelise Connell, vice-chairman of Hong Kong’s antismoking Clear the Air campaign. “The signs are good around the region.”

Hong Kong moved closer to a ban when the government late last year said it would introduce legislation to criminalize smoking in public. In April it widened the proposal to include all indoor places.

Smoking, which is estimated to kill about 5,700 of Hong Kong’s 6.9 million population every year, is already banned in cinemas, shopping malls, supermarkets, banks and department stores.

Australia’s antismoking laws, where lighting up is already banned in bars and restaurants, got even tougher this month when the powerful anti-smoking lobby and its consumer watchdog forced two of the country’s three largest tobacco firms to drop the terms ‘’light’’ and ‘’mild’’ from their products after lengthy negotiations.

Laws making tobacco companies place large, graphic pictures of diseased body parts caused by smoking-related illness on cigarette packets will also come into force later this year.

Despite advances, two of Asia’s largest smoking nations — China and Indonesia — are increasingly seen by cigarette manufacturers as among the last hopes for their ailing industry.

China has about 350 million smokers, some 36 percent of its population of 1.3 billion and 70 percent of all men. Awareness about its health impact is extremely low; about a million people die each year from smoking-related illnesses.

While Beijing has signed, but has yet to ratify, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into force in March, change is likely to be slow as some provinces, such as Yunnan, rely on the majority of their government revenue from tobacco profit.