Anti-smoking campaign targets high school students

Three government agencies are now laying the groundwork for a memorandum of understanding that will pave the way for a stepped up anti-smoking campaign which targets public and private high school students.

Alcoholic Beverage and Tobacco Control Division Director Andrew Salas said the Department of Public Health is leading the project in partnership with the public safety and the commerce departments.

According to Mr. Salas, the MOU is expected to be signed soon to allow anti-smoking advocates conduct promotional campaign on the health risks posed by tobacco use and abuse before the students leave for the summer vacation.

He disclosed that the project will utilize different methods of presentation like the use of video and other visual aids in order to effectively instill the harm of tobacco use in the minds of both junior and senior high school students.

The teams of government anti-smoking educators which will be deployed in junior and senior high schools are expected to discuss the bad effects of tobacco use in public health that range from lung cancer to severe sperm damage.

Sperm damage

A study published in the British Journal of Cancer links cancer development among children to genetic changes which cigarette smoking can cause to the sperm of their father.

The study said cigarette smoke can damage a man’s sperm and that a damaged sperm may be less able to make a woman pregnant. The report revealed that children born to smoking fathers are more likely to develop cancer as they grow up.

The study said one out of six childhood cancers are believed caused by fathers and would-be fathers whose sperms were damaged by cigarette smoking.

Children born to smoking fathers are about 15 percent lighter than other babies, have fewer white blood cells and poorer immune system. They also suffer a higher incidence of infectious diseases.

At least 56 percent of smokers undergoing treatment for heart disease were completely “impotent” compared to 21 percent of non-smokers with heart ailments.

Men who have smoked for years are often unable to have an erection due to low penile blood pressure, the Journal said.

Smokers’ wives, too

Similar studies also indicated that women married to smoking men are 40 percent at risk of developing lung cancer than women with non-smoking husbands.

Involuntary women smokers were also found to have difficulty getting pregnant because the smoke affects the fallopian tubes. Women exposed to cigarette smoke are vulnerable to early menopause and to cancer of the uterine cervix.

Health experts said smoke coming from a burning cigarette is dirtier. It is also more hazardous than the smoke being inhaled by the smoker if not filtered and at a lower temperature.

Second-hand or involuntary smokers receive the same, and sometimes worse, effects of toxic chemicals as well as what the smokers get from inhaling tobacco.

Approximately 150,000 to 300,000 children under two years old suffer from bronchitis or pneumonia as a result of breathing second-hand cigarette smoke, according to the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency.

Breathing second-hand smoke is especially bad for children because they absorb more nicotine and other toxins per kilogram of body weight than adults.

Second-hand smoke also results in chronic middle-ear disease because it increases the amount of fluid in the middle ear.

In the Western Pacific Rim, 60 percent of men and eight percent of women smoke, which translates into some 340 million men and 45 million women.

The World Health Organization said smoking population in the Asia-Pacific Region will increase by 500 million from the current 1.5 billion in 2025.

A fire in the global village, smoking is fast becoming a worldwide epidemic with at least 3.5 million people around the world dying every year because of tobacco. This figure is expected to shoot up to 10 million in annual tobacco deaths by the year 2020.

Habitual smokers are robbed of 22 years of normal life expectancy, citing evidences from recent studies which showed that about half of all persistent smokers are eventually killed by tobacco use.

Nicotine is addictive and tobacco products have and are being aggressively marketed by a powerful industry promoting to the young the images of independence, emancipation and sex appeal for products, which in reality could kill and disable.