Finding a group of freshers in colleges huddled together with cigarettes in their hands can no longer come as a surprise as smoking is finding younger victims in Bengaluru. You may now chance upon children as young as 14 puffing away, going by new research on smoking trends in the city. Teens in middle school, it appears, are lighting up little realising the health problems they are inviting. The study by the Institute of Public Health (IPH), published in the National Medical Journal of India, reveals that the approximate mean age for initiation into tobacco use in Bengaluru is today 14. 7 years. The reasons vary. Children sometimes take to it to be accepted by their friends or are either persuaded or forced to have their first smoke.
Once they begin to enjoy the taste of tobacco at an age when they have little understanding of its harmful effects, they find it difficult to say no to it later even when they do become aware of them, it says.
Clearly the young are failing to realise that tobacco is a silent killer. “By smoking you are throwing yourself open to the risk of acquiring 25 diseases which are caused by the 4,000 chemicals in a cigarette. The most fatal are heart attack, limb gangrene, stroke, lung cancer, and throat and larynx cancer,” warns Dr. I.B. Vijayalakshmi, professor of paediatric cardiology at the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research.
Each cigarette smoked reduces six minutes of life and every 8 seconds one person is dying due to its ill effects, point out doctors. So serious are the consequences of smoking that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says the number of tobacco related deaths will increase 10 fold in the 21st century as compared to the 20th. “Smokers dismiss these facts as mere numbers not realising how real the threat is.
What they need to understand is that if 1 mg of nicotine in a cigarette is taken in injection form, it can kill more instantaneously than cyanide. In fact two thirds of nicotine addicts die before they reach retirement age. And the younger you begin the habit, the more the problems,” says Dr Vijayalakshmi.
Doctors feel that schools and colleges can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to the growing tobacco addiction among their midst and must tackle it head on by counselling them against smoking. “With children getting hooked to tobacco, counselling in schools will do a great deal to nip the habit in the bud,” says Dr Pratibha Murthy of Nimhan’s de-addiction center.
There is also now a greater demand for stronger pictorial warnings on cigarette packets to dissuade people, including the young, from risking their health for a smoke.
