Chennai: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in both men and women and 90 per cent of patients with lung disease are smokers or former smokers. The situation is alarming as passive or second hand smokers are also falling prey. Ahead of the World No Tobacco Day observed on May 31, anti-tobacco activists demanded that the Centre enforce Article 5.3 of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO-FCTC), dealing with public health policies and tobacco control.
State government has been imposing a ban on smoking in public places. “We have fined about 1.2 crore people found smoking in public places since the ban came into force in 2009,” claims Dr P. Vadivelan, State Tobacco Control officer. The state authorities have managed to get declared about 1,500 schools and colleges as tobacco-free.
Pitching for stringent implementation of the article ratified by India in 2005, Dr E. Vidhubala, Associate Professor, Cancer Institute, said recently that prominent industries claimed that they had diversified into other products. “This is not the case with industries like ITC where the majority profit comes from tobacco,” she said.
In an article published in the American International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences on the health risk from tobacco and tobacco products in Tamil Nadu Dr. M. Chitra, Assistant professor, Department of Econometrics, School of Economics, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, says that tobacco is responsible for cancer of various parts of the body like mouth, throat, lungs, stomach, kidney and bladder There is one tobacco related death every 8 seconds.
