[av_one_full first min_height=” vertical_alignment=” space=” custom_margin=” margin=’0px’ padding=’0px’ border=” border_color=” radius=’0px’ background_color=” src=” background_position=’top left’ background_repeat=’no-repeat’ animation=”]
[av_heading heading=’ PEOPLE POWWOW | Tomorrow is ‘World No Tobacco Day’ ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
[/av_heading]
[av_textblock size=” font_color=” color=”]
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
[/av_textblock]
[av_textblock size=” font_color=” color=”]
31, is “World no Tobacco Day”. It will mark the 30th year since 1987 when the World Health Organization (WHO) implemented its annual campaign aimed at educating the public on the dangers of smoking tobacco and at fighting the tobacco epidemic that has cut short the lives of thousands of smokers around the world.
The theme of this year’s celebration – “Tobacco, a threat to development” – falls in the wake of President Rodrigo Duterte’s Executive Order 26 (dated May 16, 2017) banning smoking in public places and public utility vehicles nationwide.
I have friends who tried but failed to stop cigarette smoking. But there’s one who beat the habit cold turkey – no less than Regional Director Toni June Tamayo of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
I discovered how he had done it during a chance meeting in a restaurant. Since we had worked together at TESDA in the past, I asked him whether he was still a chain smoker.
Before Toni could answer, his wife Dinda butted in, “He no longer smokes.”
“How did you do it?” I asked Toni, hoping that if he could answer the question, other cigarette addicts would be benefited.
“Willpower,” he quipped. “On the day I decided to smoke my last stick, I did it.”
Just like that? What a fine example of strong determination to quit!
By that example, Toni debunked the notion that willpower alone is not enough to suppress tobacco addiction. A really determined quitter would do it in exchange for better health.
As I write this, I remember my later father. He had many times attempted to quit by smoking less frequently. But the only time he finally quit was when he caught lung cancer. Too late, he passed away as a result.
If you are one of those trying to cut back on your number of sticks because you can’t quit outright, the bad news is that halving the number of cigarettes you smoke every day hardly makes a difference in your risk of dying from smoking-related disease. Take it from a study made by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, Norway.
“A reduction in cigarette consumption by more than 50 percent,” wrote study author Aage Tveral, “is not associated with a markedly lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or smoking-related cancer.”
The study included over 51,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 34, who were monitored twice over a period of 20 years.
The participants were grouped according to their smoking history. There were those who never smoked and ex-smokers. But among those who began the study as smokers, there were quitters (stopped smoking over the course of the study), moderate smokers (1-14 cigarettes daily), reducers (started the study while smoking 15 or more cigarettes but cut that number by half) and heavy smokers (15 or more cigarettes a day).
At the end of the study, researchers found that there was no difference in the number of smoking-related deaths between the heavy smokers and the reducers. For women, in fact, the death rate from cancer rose in the group that reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked.
Only the group of men who cut back the number of cigarettes they smoked during the first 15 years of the study saw any improvement in death rates, although it was slight.
Tveral wrote that as a result of his findings, doctors and other health educators should make sure that patients understand that cutting back is not nearly the same as quitting.
In other words, the only safe way out of the risk caused by smoking is to quit. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
[/av_textblock]
[/av_one_full]
