WHY BAN SMOKING IN PUBLIC PLACES? (Feature)

April 8, 2009

RESEARCH conducted in the United States (US) showed that 18 months after a ban on smoking in public places in Colorado, hospital admission for heart attacks dropped by 27 per cent compared to areas where smoking was not banned.
In addition, there was a significant improvement in the health and productivity of restaurant and bar staff after the ban.
This was contained in paper presented by a Principal Health Research Officer at the Health Research Unit of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Mrs Edith Wellington, at a stakeholders’ sensitisation seminar on ban of smoking in public in Kumasi.
The seminar was to enable participants to share information, create awareness and mobilise support in banning smoking in public places.
Addressing the participants, Mrs Wellington said that the time had come for everybody to support the ban to protect people from the harmful effect of second-hand smoke.
Second-hand smoke, also known as environmental tobacco smoke, is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, pipe or cigar and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. It is involuntarily inhaled by non-smokers, lingers in the air hours after cigarettes have been extinguished and can cause a wide range of adverse health effects, including cancer, respiratory infections, and asthma.
Other reasons why health experts call for ban on smoking in public places is that second-hand smoke exposure causes disease and premature death in children and adults who do not smoke.
According to the experts, second-hand smoke contains hundreds of chemicals known to be toxic or carcinogenic, including some dangerous chemicals such as formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, arsenic ammonia and hydrogen cyanide, which are harmful to humans when inhaled.
It also causes almost 50,000 deaths in adult non-smokers in the United States each year, including approximately 3,400 from lung cancer and between 22,700 and 69,600 from heart diseases.
Non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke at work are at increased risk for adverse health effects. Again, levels of second-hand smoke in restaurants and bars were found to be two to five times higher than in residences with smokers and two to six times higher than in office workplaces.
Looking at these negative effects from second-hand smoke, Mrs Wellington in her presentation pointed out that non smokers deserved the right to breathe air free of second hand smoke, regardless of where they live or work.
She indicated that since some countries had been able to ban the practice, Ghana also could do that and mentioned countries such as India which had about 120 million smokers, Thailand, United Kingdom, some states in the US, Norway and Italy.
Others are Sweden, France, Denmark, Spain, Japan as well as South Africa, Uganda and Kenya in Africa .
It has been observed that one excuse that both manufacturers of tobacco products and smokers give is that they also have a right to do what they want forgetting that “the right of a person to breathe air free of poisons takes precedence over the right of smokers to smoke in public places and endanger the health of others”.
It is important for them to know that it is not about accommodation or the freedom to use a legal product. It is about where to smoke to avoid endangering the health of others.
Speaking at the seminar, the Deputy Regional Director of Health Service, Dr Joseph Oduro, said the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) aimed at protecting both the present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke.
He told the participants that the tobacco threat was a man-made profit-driven epidemic that could be stopped on its track and added that the challenge was not only to educate the public about ????????the harmful effects of tobacco use but also to see the treaty from its paper form to a legislature and eventual enforcement just had been done elsewhere.????????
The Health Information and Promotion Officer of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Country Office in Ghana, Ms Sophia Twum-Barima, said the WHO backed Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was in response to current globalisation of the tobacco epidemic which caused five million deaths a year globally.
She pointed out that these deaths could increase to eight million by 2030 if the trend continued adding that unfortunately, 70 per cent of the deaths occurred in developing countries including Ghana.
Ms Twum-Barima pointed out that because the tobacco industry was facing increased regulations and greater awareness of health risk of smoking in Europe and North America, these multinationals companies had stepped up activities in developing countries in search of new markets.
To save the lives of its citizens who did not want to die from the harmful effects of smoke, she said there was the need for Ghana to ban public smoking just like other countries which had ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). She explained that the convention imposed legal obligation on all ratifying countries to implement effective national smoke-free policies.
Looking at how harmful smoking could be to both smokers and non-smokers, it is important that the authorities put in place the policy which bans smoking in places. In the words of Mrs Wellington, “Every body has a right to good health”.
We must ensure that the basic rights of individuals are not violated by others. By banning smoking in public places, the majority of Ghanaians would be protected from the harmful effects of second-hand smoke.