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Over two million pregnant women in India consume tobacco products, a shocking figure revealed by the Indian health ministry Saturday.
'It is shocking that over 8.5 percent of the ante-natal mothers in India are tobacco users,' said Jagdish Kaur, in-charge of the tobacco control programme in the health ministry.
She said though the number of tobacco users are mostly men, yet the number is too big, especially for the pregnant women. . . .
Jagdish Kaur said that though the government has taken several steps in curbing the use of tobacco, 'cessation is the most neglected part'.
She said there are 61 tobacco cessation centres (TCC) in India, directly under the supervision of the government but more needs to be done. 'The most important thing is awareness and community participation against this.'
'Smoking should be made unfashionable. This can reduce the number of smokers definitely,' R.P. Vashisht, head of the smoke free Delhi initiative of the government said at a function organised by Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital and the pharma company Pfizer.
Speaking at the occasion, WHO technical officer (tobacco control) Dhirendra Sinha said in the south-east Asia, comprising of 11 countries including India, tobacco is a major threat to life.
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Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE / Euronext Paris: PM) announces that Frederic de Wilde, President of Philip Morris Japan, will provide investors with a review of Japan's cigarette market dynamics at the Citi Investment Research Asia Tobacco Field Trip in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, March 8, and that Roman Militsyn, Managing Director of Philip Morris Korea, will provide a similar review of South Korea's cigarette market dynamics on Wednesday, March 10, in Seoul, South Korea.
The presentations may contain projections of future results and other forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Two of the world’s richest men, with bank balances that rival the gross domestic product of small countries, are joining forces to wage war against a common enemy — the tobacco industry.
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, are making a combined investment today of $500 million (£250 million) to try to decrease smoking in countries such as China and India and to help to prevent a “tobacco epidemic” in Africa.
The billionaires, through their eponymous charities, propose to lobby governments in Asia, Africa and South America to increase taxes on cigarettes, implement smoking bans and raise knowledge of health risks. . . .
A $7 million, five-year grant to the American Cancer Society (ACS), which has taken on a more global role recently, will go toward managing a health coalition called the African Tobacco Control Consortium. . . .
Chinese fans are watching the Olympics on TV, puffing on cigarettes in a smoke-filled bar. Suddenly, when the Chinese team scores, they crush out their cigarettes and jump up to cheer. "Love China," says a message on the screen. "Increase patriotism even more. Love a smoke-free Olympics."
That public-service advertisement was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, targeting TV viewers in China during the Olympics.
The South-East Asian Conference on the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) kicked off in Nepali capital Kathmandu on Tuesday.
Nearly 50 people working in the government and non-government sector in 11 countries including Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Philippines and France are taking part in the conference held for the first time in Nepal.
The conference organized by the Health and Population Ministry and Primary Health Center jointly is expected to review the implementation condition of the convention, discuss the challenges seen during its implementation and prepare the future strategy as well.
The 16th Asian Games, part of the worldwide Olympic movement and governed by the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA), will be “going smokeless” with firm prohibitions on the sale of tobacco products and tobacco sponsorship of the Games.
The Asian Games are the second largest sports event in the world after the Summer Olympic Games.
Governed by the Olympic Council of Asia, the 16th Asian Games follows all mandates of the International Olympic Committee in which Games’ organizers are prohibited from accepting sponsorship of the Games by tobacco manufactures.
Organizers are also prohibited from allowing the sale of cigarettes or tobacco products at any athletic venue.
Assailed by the western world's laws, taxes and anti-smoking mores, the global tobacco industry has little choice but to keep pushing eastward into Asia.
Tobacco bosses learned this week that some Asians are ready to push back.
This week, more than 500 screaming protesters converged outside TabInfo Asia 2009, the region's largest tobacco summit in years. More than an expo, the event is also a strategy session conducted in secrecy.
"As rules, regulations, and perceptions of tobacco change around the globe, Asia Pacific has become one of the world's most important tobacco markets," according to promotional materials.
The event, set up by the Raleigh, N.C.-based Tobacco Reporter magazine, invited major industry players gathered to discuss "operating in a world of bans" and "ingenious ways of operating in an increasingly regulated, plain-pack, dark market environment."
"Asia is the fastest growing tobacco market in the world. They can't afford to ignore this region," said Prakit Vathesatogkit, executive secretary of the Bangkok-based Action on Smoking and Health Foundation.
"We can't really stop them from coming," Prakit said, "but we can try to stop them from circumventing regulation."
On Wednesday, the summit's first day, attendees were beset by a loose coalition of Southeast Asian anti-smoking protesters. Outside the event doors, a 500-plus crowd of mostly college students screamed at men in suits entering Bangkok's largest convention center.
THE BIG ISSUES. THE BIG PLAYERS THE BIG EXHIBITION. THE BIG CONGRESS. It's all here at the Asia Pacific area's premier tobacco event
Bangkok - the commercial centre and capitol of Thailand - a city famous for gold-spired temples, long-tail boats, three-wheel tuk-tuks, and fiery curries. From November 11th to the 13th, Bangkok will also be the host for the hottest event on the Asia Pacific tobacco market's calendar.
WORLD'S MOST IMPORTANT MARKETS
As rules, regulations, and perceptions of tobacco change around the globe, Asia Pacific has become one of the world's most important tobacco markets. That's why TABINFO ASIA holds a spot as one of the most noteworthy and important tobacco events of the year. TABINFO ASIA attracts not only a large number of participants, but also a very diverse representation of industry players - up and down the supply chain. The expanded list of participants makes this a must-attend event for networking, showcasing, discovering, buying, and selling.
THE BIG ISSUES
The Congress at TABINFO ASIA is focused on The New Landscape of Tobacco as key industry leaders tackle the big issues head on. Everyone attending will have a unique opportunity to participate in the discussion in order to make this a truly impactful event.
In this industry - and especially in this region - you cannot afford to miss a thing.
Thailand may have a reputation for indulging visitors in their various vices, but smoking is no longer one of them. On Tuesday, more than 600 fired-up protesters invaded a convention center in Bangkok in an attempt to smoke out representatives of the global tobacco industry, who were holding a conference in a country with some of the strictest tobacco controls in Asia.
"They've come here because they want to target women and children in Asia with products that kill," says Bangorn Ritthiphakdee, director of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance, a civil-society group, referring to attendees of Tabinfo 2009, a three-day conference organized by Tobacco Reporter, a U.S.-based magazine. "Their presence is a nightmare. We came to tell them they are not welcome here." (Watch a video about France's smoking ban.)
The tobacco industry sees Asia as its most promising market, says Bangorn. Though Thailand has strict controls on smoking in public places and bans advertising of tobacco products, more than 14 million of its 65 million people are smokers. In Southeast Asia, 125 million -- or 31% of adults -- smoke, and China alone has some 350 million smokers. The alliance claims that 2.4 million people in Asia die each year from tobacco-related causes, the equivalent of 6,575 people a day.
Billed as "the biggest tobacco exhibition in Asia," Tabinfo 2009 has been years in the making. Nonetheless, the meeting apparently caught Thailand's government by surprise.
Indonesians should turn their attention away from Malaysian theft of their culture to American maltreatment of a rather different national icon – the kretek cigarette.
As of October 1 it will become a criminal offense in the supposedly free United States to sell kretek, the clove-enhanced cigarette dear to most Indonesian smokers and increasingly to foreigners. Indonesia should take this behavior to the World Trade Organisation. The country which in the name of free trade has for decades ensured that its tobacco companies are foisted on the world has the temerity to ban somebody else's exports to the US. . . .
The hypocrisy of the US is stunning. According to a study by Frank J. Chaloupka and Adit Laixuthai for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the US in the 1980s and 1990s used Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to force open the cigarette markets of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand. "Estimates from fixed-effects models indicate that the market share of US cigarettes in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand increased dramatically after the agreements as consumers switched from the brands produced by domestic monopolies to the brands of US cigarette producers," Chaloupka and Laixuthai wrote. "In addition, simulations based on the regression results indicate that per capita cigarette consumption in 1991 in the four affected countries was nearly 10 percent higher than it would have been had the markets remained closed to U.S. cigarettes." . . .
In fact smoking disease patterns suggest that American-style flue-cured, Virginia tobacco with chemical additives which are the most dangerous cigarettes – certainly compared with the air-cured black tobacco ones such as France's traditional Gauloises and Gitanes.
The ban on kretek is discriminatory. One can be sure that if cloves were grown in the US there would be no such ban. As it is, Indonesians might think a reasonable riposte would be to ban all US-brand name colas until the kretek ban is lifted. After all, who knows what noxious substances are in Coca-Cola? The formula is a secret.
Laos government officials have launched a smoke-free Vientiane to help address health and environmental concerns in the lead-up to the 25th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in December.
Vientiane Vice-Mayor Somvandy Nathavong said the new initiative will target local businesses and people, in particular students and teenagers. . . .
The Vientiane Administration office worked in conjunction with the ministry of public health to organise the ceremony, which was supported by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) Laos, Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance and Lao-Vietnam Insurance company in Vientiane.
Thailand's reputation as a Southeast Asian country with strong anti-smoking laws faces a direct challenge from the tobacco multinational companies that are due to gather in the Thai capital in November for a major industry congress and exhibition.
The organizers of the cigarette promotion gathering, TABINFO Asia 2009, are not leaving anything to the imagination as to why Bangkok has been chosen as the venue for the Asia-Pacific region's "own dedicated tobacco show".
"The Asia-Pacific region has not escaped the global credit meltdown. But its cigarette market remains more buoyant than elsewhere," declares the Tobacco Reporter trade publication in its
website. "The region remains one of the world's most promising cigarette markets."
Participants are promised an event, which runs from November 11-13, that will feature "The Big Issues. The Big Players", trumpets the conference website. It will offer "a very diverse representation of industry players up and down the supply chain. The expanded list of participants makes this a must-attend event for networking, showcasing, discovering, buying, and selling".
The market opportunities of four countries in the region - Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand - are already being highlighted by the trade publication to swell the number of cigarette enthusiasts for the Bangkok trade show. . . .
The choice of a developing country as a venue for this flagship event for tobacco multinationals comes at a time when the tobacco market in the developed world is shrinking due to a battery of tobacco control policies and the world's dominant cigarette producers are looking to the developing world to boost their fortunes.
This trend is reflected in the places where the tobacco industry has gathered every two years prior to Bangkok. The 2007 tobacco trade fair was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil; in 2005 it was the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.
For most of the past 25 years, Hong Kong-based, British-born doctor Judith Mackay has been the tobacco control movement in Asia. . . .
Her success is based on her ability to convince the right person with the right power to make changes that will save lives. And she is happy to take advantage of non-democratic regimes.
"That is one of the reasons I was so active in the 1980s. Once you had democracies, you have white papers and green papers, you had public debates and forums and it went on forever," the 65-year-old said from her Hong Kong home.
"I found I could jump over quite a few fences in one go," added Mackay, who has been a senior policy adviser to the World Health Organization for more than 10 years.
Her vigour has inevitably drawn the attention of the tobacco industry -- she was once described by a trade organisation as one of the three most dangerous people in the world. . . .
wing professionalism of the Asia's anti-tobacco movement, boosted by a grant from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's foundation.
It funds her position at the World Lung Foundation working on cutting tobacco use in low- and middle-income countries, with a focus on Asia.
"Bloomberg has brought business management into tobacco control. It is not an option to run over deadlines, like some academics and governments," she said.
"You are now offered a career path in tobacco control. Before, there was nobody to employ you."
Myanmar is asking the Philippines for zero duty access for the exports of tobacco and cigarette products. Similar requests were also filed by Myanmar to Thailand and Malaysia.
The Tariff Commission will conduct a public hearing today on the Myanmar request along with the review of the expiring zero duty rates on imported cement and wheat.
At present, Tariff Commission official said that tobacco and cigarette products are included under the ASEAN Integration System of Preferences and as such ASEAN slapped tobacco with three percent tariff and cigarette at five percent.
The AISP is a scheme where ASEAN 6 gives unilateral import duty exemption to products of export interests to the CLMV ( Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam ).
Many East Asians get a red face when they drink alcohol. This is the result of a genetic condition that also increases drinkers' risk of esophageal cancer. Transcript of radio broadcast: 12 May 2009 . . .
The cause is a genetic difference that they are born with called an ALDH2 deficiency. It prevents their bodies from processing alcohol the way other people do.
But the effects might be more serious than just a red face. Researchers warn of a link between this condition and an increased risk of cancer of the esophagus from drinking alcohol. A new report appeared in March in the journal PLoS Medicine, published by the Public Library of Science. . . .
Philip Brooks is a researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the United States. He says it is important to educate people about the link between the alcohol flushing effect and esophageal cancer.
He says doctors should ask East Asian patients about their experiences with facial flushing after drinking alcohol. Those with a history of it should be advised to limit their alcohol use. They should also be warned that cigarette smoking works with the alcohol in a way that further increases the risk of esophageal cancer.