As the saying goes, you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Three recent surveys prove beyond reasonable doubt – yet again, most would add – that notwithstanding the deleterious effects of active and passive smoking many still persist in causing damage to themselves and to those around them, including their most loved ones, such as children.
Last week, a study by Maltese doctors contained some shocking statistics about the effect of smoking on children. Thirty-one per cent of children aged between five and eight were passive smokers, followed by 51 per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds. Apart from more extensive exposure to direct and second-hand smoke, it has also been confirmed that smoking parents impart a “very bad example” to their children and induce them to start smoking themselves.
The study did have a silver lining, though. It results that passive smoking among teenagers is on the decline, indicating education could be bearing fruit.
May that be the case for the findings of an EU-wide survey, announced in the middle of this month, painted a gruesome picture of a stubborn cigarette smoker that could be in denial of the real effects tobacco has on one’s own health.
The research concluded that bloody images and alarming messages on cigarette packets seem to have done little to repel Maltese smokers. It does not appear that the messages escaped their attention – in fact, many of those interviewed could recall them – but most admitted they simply ignored the messages.
Worse, not even the “messages” one carries on one’s own body as a result of tobacco consumption appear to be that off-putting. A campaign that the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Directorate launched in the last days of 2011 stresses the point that smokers can look between eight and 12 years older than they actually are because smoking actively ages one’s appearance.
Smoking results in the inhalation of a complex cocktail of poisons that lead to early wrinkles, bad skin and damaged hair.
Apart from the external and visible consequences of smoking, internal complications are legion and this results in avoidable death. Indeed, smoking is the commonest cause of avoidable death. It kills half its users: 650,000 persons in the EU alone annually.
This has been said before but the consequences of tobacco use can be so serious and tragic that they should be highlighted as often as possible.
Individuals usually start smoking through peer pressure and then become addicted because of substances added to cigarettes to encourage addiction. This leads to 11 times more people dying of tobacco in the EU than from traffic accidents.
Cancer, hypertension, stroke and heart attack are all caused or worsened by smoking. In addition, women who smoke are up to 40 times more likely to get a heart attack. The chances of smokers likely to have menstrual problems and find it more difficult to become pregnant as their fertility rate is reduced by about 28 per cent also increase. Smokers also become more prone to develop pregnancy complications and have babies with health problems.
Education, as was noted above, helps but perhaps the best way to discourage smoking is to make tobacco prohibitively expensive. Smokers should be heavily taxed for two reasons: to discourage tobacco consumption and the effects of second-hand smoke on others and to fund the treatment of the inevitable health problems that such self-destructive habits generate in both smokers and others, again, through second-hand smoke.
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