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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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How To Reduce Smoking Rates? Cigarette smoking can harm almost every organ of the body and reduce the health of smokers in general. Smokers can eventually develop many diseases, including lung cancers, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). So nearly every nation in the world have been trying very hard to reduce the smoking rates. While the Health Promotion Board (HPB) in Singapore decided to get smoking rates down to 12 percent 2 years ago, the smoking rate has always hovered between 13 and 14 percent for the past 6 or 7 years. As such, HPB mooted 4 proposals for public discussion. Of these proposals, 2 are hard measures to raise the minimum legal age for smoking and to ban additives in tobacco products. The other 2 proposals aim to reduce the appeal of cigarettes by selling them in generic packages and to enlarge the graphic health warnings on their packaging. There is scientific evidence indicating people who do not start smoking before the age of 21 are unlikely to ever begin. In other words, the younger children are when they first start smoking, the more likely they will become regular smokers. Many young people begin smoking because their friends are smoking. If they were not doing it, they felt that they are not part of the group. But according to some ex-smokers, young people at 21 are less susceptible to peer pressure and are less likely to pick up smoking. Needham, a town in Massachusetts in the United States, raised the minimum age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21 over 3 years, and teen smoking rates fell by half, from 13 percent to 7 percent. Hawaii is also going to make a bill to raise the legal smoking age to 21. Those who are caught breaking the rules would be fined $10 for the first offense. Subsequent offenses would lead to a $50 fine or mandatory community service. Every year, 5,600 kids in Hawaii try smoking each year, and 90 percent of daily smokers begin the habit before the age of 19. 1,200 people die from tobacco use or exposure in Hawaii every year.
Unadulterated cigarette smoke can irritate the throat, and can turn younger smokers off. But if cigarettes are added with the flavors of vanilla, chocolate and menthol, it would be easier for the first-time smoker to get hooked. Flavored cigarettes tend to be especially popular among younger smokers and women. The additives often mislead people into thinking that the flavored cigarettes are not as bad as regular cigarettes, and cannot be as harmful as anything else. Both the United States and European Union have already passed laws to ban the addition of flavors to tobacco. Generic packaging and gory pictures are designed to make cigarette packets as unappealing as possible in many countries. In 2012, Australia was the first country to implement plain packaging. After the implementation, calls to Quitline, phone service for people who want to kick the habit, increased by 78 percent. Its graphic health warnings are also the second-largest in the world, after Thailand, and cover three-quarters of the front and nearly all of the back of the packaging. Besides alerting smokers to the possible impact on their health, larger warnings also mean less space for company logos and other marketing gimmicks. In Singapore, these graphic pictures, which have been printed on cigarette packets since 2004, are rotated every few years, so as not to lose their impact. If standardized packaging is also implemented, all tobacco companies would have to repackage their cigarettes uniformly, with different brands adopting the same colors. Such measures are not only to deter those who are already smokers, but also to stop people from picking up the habit in the first place. The attractiveness and appeal of tobacco products are greatly reduced both to the consumers and to the people who may be thinking of experimenting.
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