CONSUMER CONCERNS – Cigarette and other Tobacco use… DANGEROUS TO HEALTH
For many years now the dangers of tobacco use have been propagated world-wide, especially in the Western World where the main tobacco companies are based. International Organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WH0) and the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) have done a great deal of valuable work in educating people all over the world as to the dangers to their health from tobacco usage.
In Europe and North America the populations are well informed of the detailed dangers to health they face from the use of cigarettes and this knowledge is buttressed by very stringent anti-tobacco legislation which almost all Western States have now enacted.
The Western States realise that though tobacco is a very lucrative taxation source, this is more than counter-balanced by the costs the Public Health Systems have to bear by treatment of tobacco-caused ailments and the shortened working life of the labour force as well as inefficient labour.
The tobacco industry has had powerful ripostes against these measures and they counter-attack with massive and skilled propaganda campaigns, suborning members of the medical and scientific communities to prove that tobacco is safe and distribute gifts, cut prices and give other inducements to the young to have them begin using cigarettes. They also fiercely and methodically resist legal actions brought by consumers against them for impairment of health.
In Europe and North America tobacco and particularly cigarette usage is on the downward spiral and doctors and health workers and indeed, most people hope it will be eliminated in the forseeable future. The tobacco companies have therefore most aggressively turned their attention to Third World countries and there is now, proportionally more tobacco, and particularly cigarette consumption there than in Western Countries.
In Guyana, a Third World country, tobacco and particularly cigarette consumption has been increasing, judging by the continuous and growing profits the tobacco company has been reaping.
Dr Leslie Ramsammy, as Minister of Health, was a person who was emotionally and intellectually committed to the eradication of tobacco, and particularly cigarette usage in Guyana in the interest of the nation’s health.
Under his tenure, modern tobacco legislation was drafted, the Tuberculosis Society as well as other NGO’s involved in education of the population of the dangers of tobacco were stimulated, and he did inspire the making of a new tobacco standard by the National Bureau of Standards. Unfortunately, when he left the Ministry to take up the portfolio of the Ministry of Agriculture, all these efforts were left in abeyance.
The time has now come for the Health Authorities, the Consumer Advocates as well as other NGO’s and the Ministry of Education to comprehensively accelerate the education of the population against the dangers of tobacco, on the acceptance of the new tobacco standard and the urgency of enacting tobacco legislation. We will return to these issues in a further article, but in the meantime, we should like to mention the main diseases caused by tobacco and cigarette use.
By the compulsion of space, we cannot detail how cigarettes cause these diseases which are due to the poisons in them. We will however list some of these diseases:
Cataracts of the eyes; hearing loss; tooth-decay; swelling of the air tracts in the lungs, thus affecting the inflow of oxygen and the expulsion of carbon dioxide (Emphysema); osteoporosis caused by not enough oxygen going into the blood; stomach ulcers caused by reduction of resistance to bacteria which cause stomach ulcers; deformed sperm causing children to be born with physical deformities; and of course, Heart Disease and Cancers of various types.
In a future article, we will outline action being taken by the Guyana Consumers Association and others in striving to protect the safety of the population, especially the youths against the dangers of cigarettes.
By Pat Dial
