WORLD NO TOBACCO DAY 2012
  On the occasion of World No Tobacco Day May 31, 2012 (Thursday), the WHO said that as countries move to meet their obligations under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the tobacco industry is becoming more aggressive in its attempts to undermine the treaty by acting against the policies contained in it.
  The World Health Organisation (WHO) on may 30, 2012 urged governments in Southeast Asia to beware of the tobacco industry`s interference in tobacco control programme by targeting the youths through increased advertising budgets in several countries. According to the WHO, India and Indonesia are among the top ten tobacco leaf producers in the world. In addition, the region is one of the largest producers of smokeless tobacco products. Ninety percent of global smokeless tobacco users live in Southeast Asia. The sale of smokeless tobacco products in India increased by over 25
percent between 2005 and 2010, it added.
  The UCSF campus community is invited and encouraged to celebrate World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) on Thursday, May 31, at several UCSF sites. UCSF is proud to participate in the World Health Organization’s global event. This year’s goals are threefold: to help people quit smoking, increase awareness of health care providers in how to help people quit, and provide information about the World Health Organization’s theme “Tobacco Industry Interference.” 
  World No Tobacco Day is meant to encourage a 24-hour period of abstinence from all forms of tobacco consumption across the globe. The day is intended to draw global attention to the widespread prevalence of tobacco use and to negative health effects.  
  World No Tobacco Day in India
  Around 2000 deaths each day in India and 5 million per year globally are courtesy of tobacco. 4 out of every 10 cancers in India are due to tobacco. In a country, where more than 70% of the population resides in the villages where chewing tobacco , smoking a bidi or hookah are common ways of ‘entertainment’ or passing free time, it really is no
surprise that tobacco causes 3 lacs new cases of Oral cancer   each year in India alone. Every 6 seconds someone on the Earth dies due to tobacco.
  Tobacco is consumed in various forms in different countries right from being used to massage gums in a country like India, to smoking in bidis and cigarettes to being chewed by itself or along with betel leaves. While the forms are different, the effect is the same – Oral Cancer. Cancer of the gums, lips, cheeks, palate, and tongue are the various disguises it assumes in the process of causing permanent damage to the consumer. Slow and steady yet not stealthily, it gives multiple signs on its way to death to stop using it. Nevertheless, these are more often than not, ignored by people. Most often these signs come so late that stopping tobacco consumption   will not affect the outcome in anyway. The damage has been done. And thus the stress on preventing people from getting addicted to it and give it up before onset of tell-tale signs.
  Starting from May 31, 2009 the World No Tobacco Day, all tobacco products in India will carry graphic pictorial warnings. Given the horrifying big picture, health authorities are hoping that newly introduced pictorial warnings like skull and cross bones, scorpion and diseased  lungs on cigarette packets and other tobacco products in India, will prove  effective as a deterrent especially when it comes to young people. The law to ban smoking in public places in the India introduced last year.
  Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy announced  a complete ban on the manufacture and sale of pan masala products in the state, at a press  conference on May 26, 2012. Kerala has thus become the second state in the country after Madhya Pradesh to ban gutka products. “We are banning these products for the improvement of public health. Even though our state has a lot of advanced health centres and experts for cancer care, the use of gutka has brought a lot of suffering to the people of the state.The number of patients ailing from oral cancer has increased and this compelled us to act,” said the Chief Minister. The state government has enforced the ban on gutka/ pan masala under the provisions of Food Safety and Standards Regulation Act 2011.

  

    
  Starting from May 31, the World No Tobacco Day, all tobacco products in India will carry graphic pictorial warnings.
   
    
  No smoking. Smoking is killing nearly a million people a year in India. Now ban on smoking at public places.

   
 The Bollywood, actor Shah Rukh Khan, said in an interview that the thing he hated most about himself was his inability to stop smoking. "I know I have to. I know as a role model I shouldn't be sending that message," he said. "It's a horrible habit. I have to work harder to stop."

   No smoking at public places
   Ban on smoking at public places all over the country comes into effect from  2nd October 2008.  Violation of the ban, imposed under the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 2003, will attract a fine of up to Rs.200. 
  Smoking will be prohibited at all places to which the public has access, including auditoriums, health institutions, government buildings, restaurants, courts, public conveyances, public transport, stadiums, railway stations, bus stops, workplaces, shopping malls, refreshment rooms, discotheques, pubs and airport lounges. The ban will not cover open spaces. Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has welcomed the Supreme Court order declining to stay the Centre’s notification prohibiting smoking.   He said he had personally written to Governors, Chief Ministers, Health Ministers and Members of Parliament to ensure effective implementation of the ban. 
   The law clearly defines the duties and responsibilities of the owner, manager, proprietor, supervisor and anyone in charge of a public place so that he or she could enforce these provisions. In large hotels and restaurants having more than 30 rooms or 30 seats and airports, a provision for a separate smoking area is made. Public places would have to identify the individuals empowered to enforce the law, issue challans or collect fines. 
  Recent findings from the first nationally representative study of smoking in India found that this country is in the grip of a smoking epidemic likely to cause nearly a million deaths a year starting in 2010. There are 120 million smokers in India, half of them younger than 30, the study found. India has a larger population of smokers than any other country in the world except China. The research was conducted across the country by a team of 900 field workers from India, Canada and Britain and the results published online in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. 
  The study found that more than half of smoking-related deaths would be among poor and illiterate Indians. It also offered some medical surprises about the way smoking worsens diseases, researchers said. According to the findings, for example, 40 percent of tuberculosis cases in India were due to smoking, since smoking converts the disease in the lungs more quickly. 
  In the year 2010 alone, smoking will cause close to a million deaths in India, and 70% of those deaths will occur in men and women ages 30 to 69, according to Prabhat Jha, M.D., of the Center for Global Health at the University of Toronto, and colleagues, who made those predictions in an article published in New England Journal of Medicine. 
   Dr. Jha and colleagues studied smoking in a nationally representative sample of 1.1 million Indian households. They compared the prevalence of smoking among 33,000 deceased women and 41,000 deceased men with the prevalence of smoking among 35,000 living women and 43,000 living men. 
. Typically Indians smoke bidis, a sort of mini-cigarette wrapped in the leaf of another plant and which contains only about 25% of the tobacco in a U.S. cigarette. In the U.S., tobacco use accounts for at least 30% of all cancer deaths and 87% of lung cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. In 2007, about 168,000 (or one in three) cancer deaths will be caused by tobacco use, the society added. Tobacco use was responsible for nearly one in five all-cause deaths per year, an estimated 440,000 deaths in the U.S. during 1997 to 2001, according to the society. 
  Among the findings in India: 
  Roughly 5% of women ages 30 to 69 were smokers as were 37% of men in that age group. For women ages 30 to 69, smoking was associated with a doubling of the risk of death from any medical cause (risk ratio 2.0, 99% CI 1.8 to 2.3) and for men in that age group, smoking was associated with a 70% increase in the risk of death from any medical cause (RR 1.7, 99% CI 1.6 to 1.8). 
  The most likely cause of excess mortality among smokers was tuberculosis (RR 3.0, 99% CI 2.4 to 3.9 for women and 2.3, 99% CI 2.1 to 2.6 for men). 
  Smoking was associated with an eight-year reduction in median survival for women and a six-year reduction in median survival for men. 
  Assuming the associations between smoking and excess mortality were mainly causal, smoking among people ages 30 to 69 is responsible for one in five deaths in men and one in 20 deaths in women. 
  In 2010, smoking will cause 930,000 adult deaths in India. 
  Moreover, "tobacco use and alcohol are strongly correlated, so residual confounding by the use of alcohol could explain some of the excess mortality among smokers." 
  And smokers tend to live with other smokers, which could "have inflated the rates of smoking among control subjects." 
   The authors acknowledged that "the tubercle bacillus is obviously a cause of all deaths from tuberculosis." But they said that smoking could contribute to tuberculosis deaths because subclinicalinfection is widespread and "smoking could facilitate the progression to clinical disease." 
  The study was funded by grants from the John E. Fogarty Center of the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian International Development Research Center, the Canadian Institute of Health Research, the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, the Keenan Research Center, Cancer Research U.K., and the United Kingdom Medical Research Council. Dr. Jha reported no potential conflict of interest.  
   Indian health authorities want tobacco companies to print grisly images of tobacco-related diseases on packets of cigarettes and beedis, but face opposition from politicians keen to protect the jobs of tobacco workers

  

 Tobacco contains 4000 chemicals
  Tobacco contains 4000 chemicals of which 250 are known to be harmful and 50 known to cause cancer . Of all those who consume tobacco, hardly 37% know about the harmful effects. People are barely aware that tobacco
increases risk of coronary heart disease  and stroke. Those who are aware want to quit. But its only when it’s too late that people actually give it up. Second-hand smoking or passive smoking   as it is commonly called is when one inhales smoke from cigarettes, etc. from those actively smoking around them, as is common in public places like
restaurants, theatres, bus stops, stations, even at home. This passive smoking causes sudden death in infants and low birth weight   babies in pregnant women. It causes heart attacks, stroke, respiratory disorders, and lung cancer to name a few.
  WORLD NO TOBACCO DAY 2011
   World No Tobacco Day 2011 highlights the critical importance of ensuring full implementation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first international public health treaty that provides a comprehensive approach to reduce the considerable health and economic burden caused by tobacco. Developed in response to the globalisation of the tobacco epidemic, it is one of the most rapidly embraced treaties in the history of the United Nations. It was adopted by the World Health Assembly on May 21, 2003 and entered into force less than two years later, on February 27, 2005. More than 170 of the 193 member states of WHO are parties to it.
  The WHO selects "The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control" as the theme of the World No Tobacco Day 2011, falling on May 31 (Tuesday). On World No Tobacco Day 2011, and throughout the following year, WHO will urge countries to put the treaty at the heart of their efforts to control the global epidemic of tobacco use. By heeding WHO's call, countries will enhance their ability to significantly reduce the toll of
tobacco-related diseases and deaths in line with their treaty obligations.
   History of World No Tobacco Day
  WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco came into action in February 2005 and has the following objectives: 
1 To raise taxes
2 To enforce bans on tobacco and products
3 To warn about its dangers
4 To offer help to quit tobacco consumption
5 To protect people from future tobacco use
6 To monitor tobacco use and prevention policies
  In July 1998, WHO came up with the Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) to strengthen its fight against tobacco. It launched the MPOWER campaign to monitor tobacco use and implementation of policies against tobacco to make the TFI a reality. Efforts of WHO have received immense support and implementation from UN and all its member nations but yet the earning from tobacco and its products is 173 times more than the expenditure on its curtailment and awareness.
  Quit smoking
  Smoking is the leading cause of preventable illness. Quitting smoking is the single best thing you can do for your health. Most smokers know that tobacco is bad for their health and they want to quit.More than three-fourths of the current smokers have tried to quit at least once. Quitting smoking is tough. It takes time, planning, patience, effort and energy and a strong motivation. There are very many ways and options to quit — counselling, smoking cessation programmes, nicotine replacement therapy and prescription medications. If one has a markedly strong will, quitting cold turkey without the help of other modes is possible. A well planned, ideal and customized combination of options greatly reduces the pain and discomfort of quitting that may prove intense during the initial few days or weeks.
  Avoid smoking in your home. Throw away your ash trays. Save yourself and your family from the toxic effects of second-hand smoke. Your family and friends can play a valuable role in your new life as a non-smoker. Encouragement from loved ones is extremely helpful. They form your biggest cheerleaders. Be serious and firm in your resolve. Stay motivated and focus all your attention on quitting, giving it the highest priority. Be busy both physically and mentally all the time.  

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