Tobacco and heart disease

IT is frightening to hear that the use of tobacco products, particular cigarette smoking, has increased many times in PNG over the past 20 years and we are now ranked as the highest user of tobacco products in the Western Pacific Region.
Today is World No Tobacco Day and PNG joins the World Health Organisation to mark this event.
This year’s theme is “Tobacco and heart disease”.
World No Tobacco Day 2018 will focus on the impact tobacco has on the cardiovascular health of people worldwide.
Tobacco use is an important risk factor for the development of coronary heart disease, stroke, and peripheral vascular disease.
Despite the known harms of tobacco to heart health, and the availability of solutions to reduce related death and disease, knowledge among large sections of the public that tobacco is one of the leading causes of CVD is low.
Indirect health impacts include asphyxia (breathing difficulties) in new born babies and low birth weights, making the child vulnerable to other diseases.
Results from a global youth tobacco survey conducted in PNG in 2016, showed that 53 per cent of young people (aged 13-15) are regularly smoking.
This rate is likely to be higher than reported with the increasing availability of counterfeit cigarettes and illicit tobacco.
This is where the new Tobacco Control Act, which was passed into law in 2016, comes in.
The purpose of the Act is to place controls on the sale, use and promotion of tobacco products and to use the mechanisms open to Government, and through new regulations to be released later this year, to significantly reduce the harmful use of the tobacco products.
That would include strict controls on advertising and much strong controls on making smoking attractive to young people.
Controlling advertising on smoking through the main stream media is manageable but the same cannot be said about social media.
The law also intends to regulate the manufacture, importation, distribution, sale and use of tobacco.
Health Secretary Pascoe Kase has suggested to stop the sale of cigarettes in packets less than 25 and the sale of packages of loose tobacco of less than 25 grams in shops with the assumption that it will discourage young people from smoking.
Realistically, young people do not necessarily have to purchase this from shops.
Take a look on the streets, the business of informal sector is thriving and a vendor who has been selling tobacco products has seen the return on investment.
It’s not for a rocket scientist to see that vendors will capitalise on the ban, purchase in bulk and continue selling and if the demand is high, the cost increases also.
Currently, a loose cigarette is selling at K1.20 on the street and from a packet of 25, a calm K30 is collected.
A packet purchased is around K24/K25 depending on where it’s bought.
That is cigarette alone, loose tobacco also is another product which vendors collect well from its sale.
Who will take on the responsibility to penalise those who defy the instruction of selling loose cigarettes?
Is the Tobacco Control Act already being implemented?
For all we know, it could already be another white paper collecting dust at Waigani.
The challenge will be controlling the sale of tobacco products out on the streets.
It is now important to the Government and all concerned stakeholders that this damage to the health of our people and our development is halted.