Health@Heart
Smoking kills 250 daily
I honestly cannot fathom to this day why we legalize the use of a deadly substance that causes illnesses and then spend money looking for cures for the diseases it causes
AT least 250 Filipinos die each day, yes, each day, or about 90,000 a year, from smoking-related illnesses, cardiovascular, pulmonary, metabolic diseases, and cancers, especially lung cancers. In Malaysia about 10,000, and Vietnam at least 40,000, die annually from tobacco-related conditions. Indonesia’s death toll is the worst: 400,000 a year.
The sad fact is that official global tobacco youth survey has revealed that the “smoking prevalence among Filipino youth had jumped from 15% in 2003 to 21.6% in 2007,” and extrapolated to go even higher.
“We are losing the war against smoking,” stated Maricar Limpin, executive director of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Alliance Philippines (FCAP), “indicating that the law has not been effective.”
The 2003 act “sets both the guidelines for and regulation of the packaging, sale, distribution, and advertisements of tobacco products,” and also mandating the printing of warnings about the harmful effects of smoking.
Those figures above are from the 2005-2006 Tobacco and Poverty Study in the Philippines conducted by the College of Public Health of the University of the Philippines, National Epidemiology Center of the Department of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The past 3 years or so, even the printing of graphic warnings to discourage smoking has been blocked by many lawmakers. Do they have any vested financial interest to protect?
“It is being blocked because of fears it could kill the tobacco industry,” Northern Samar Rep. Paul Daza, main author of the anti-smoking bill, said.
Obviously, for political correctness and expediency, majority of our legislators in Congress prefer to protect the tobacco industry and allow tobacco to continue to kill our people. What money from the tobacco lobby can do, huh?
Smoking kills. It is that plain and simple. There is no more doubt today that tobacco (cigarette smoking) is the predominant cause of lung cancer, besides other malignancies and cardiovascular diseases that maim, kill men and women and hurt our society, especially our children. In the United States alone, almost half a million die each year from smoking-related illnesses. These are preventable deaths! Demographic studies have shown that smokers are about 10 times more prone to die premature deaths than non-smokers. This unnecessary loss of lives is at an immense direct cost for non-smokers in terms of increased health risks from passive smoking, in higher health insurance premiums and taxes, not to mention personal and family tragedies in all shapes and forms.
As we have alluded to in a previous column, secondhand smoke is even more dangerous. Innocent bystanders are forced to inhale cigarette smoke at their workplaces or in public places, thus increasing their health risk. The Environmental Protection Agency engineers have shown that even the best available ventilation and air-moving equipment were unable to reduce carcinogenic (cancer-causing) air contamination to a safe level for a non-smoker sharing work space with a habitual smoker.
If you think about it, our government and those of other nations are peddling drugs (albeit addictive tobacco is a milder killer substance) in the name of profit, wantonly sacrificing their citizens’ health and future, shortening people’s lives, causing trillions of dollars or more of expenditures for research as to how to fight the habit, how to cure the tobacco-induced illnesses, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer, etc. This is plain stupidity.
As a cardiac surgeon, I can see the prescription, the solution that is obvious even to billions of non-medical people (including school graders) with common sense around the world: Eliminate the darn cause, the poison! Then, you don’t have to do expensive research looking for the “antidote” or finding the cure, etc. Instead, save the billions (or trillion) of dollars in each country to eliminate graft and corruption among government officials and eradicate poverty among the destitute, homeless and hungry. This way, we can even have these added bonuses: a smokeless society, a healthier citizenry, a nobler nation, and a less polluted environment ecologically friendlier to Mother Earth!
I might be naïve, a simpleton, or simply stupid, but I honestly cannot fathom to this day why we legalize the use of a deadly substance that causes illnesses and then spend money looking for cures for the diseases it causes, or why a government or a society would not get rid of a proven addictive poison, like tobacco, which maims and kills its people and devastates tens of millions of families. Maybe I am dumb too.
Unfortunately, the senseless global smoke-filled “killing field”, protected by our very own government, will continue. And I am fuming mad!
(Please visit www.FUN8888.com. Email: scalpelpen@gmail.com)
