Chennai: Barely 10 per cent people, including male, female and adolescents, have quit smoking in the state, according to 2014 reports. A very recent research published in the British Medical journal has stated that it takes around 30 failed attempts for a smoker to actually succeed in quitting.
The question then arises as to how long it will be before the state sees a fall in the number of deaths caused as a result of tobacco consumption. “If efforts are put in to bring about changes, more than 160 million people can be saved by 2050. For that to happen, the number of people, who could start smoking, should be reduced to half and 50 per cent of the consumers must quit today,” said Dr V. Shanta, chairperson, Adyar Cancer Institute.
According to the research that was published on the British Medical Journal website on Thursday, ‘five million deaths each year are attributable to smoking, with an estimated rise to as much as 10 million deaths per year by the 2030s’.
It went on to add that ‘despite the widespread awareness of the harms of smoking, millions continue to smoke around the world partly due to the difficulty it takes to quit’.
Dr E. Vidhubala, an associate professor in the Resource Centre for Tobacco Control at the Cancer Institute said, “Finding it difficult to quit smoking because of being addicted is not true. Anyone can quit smoking. An individual who has quit should get proper love and counselling from family members and loved ones else he/she may get back to the bad habit.”
American author Mark Twain was reported to have said, ‘Quitting smoking is easy: I’ve done it thousands of times’. Smoking cessation is however, a difficult and complex process, as is mentioned in the BMJ research and smokers use many methods and approaches to achieve cessation.
“Tobacco consumption kills approximately 6 million people globally each year, of which, 5 million are smokers and 1 million passive smokers,” said Dr Raju Titus Chacko, Professor and Head, Medical Oncology, Christian Medical College, Vellore. “It will take years of efforts on the part of the state to see to it that the burden is reduced,” he added.
