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NGOs outline anti-smoking goals  

HEALTH officials and NGOs have formulated six recommendations for the government to step up its anti-smoking efforts, as a national seminar on tobacco control wound up in Phnom Penh on Thursday.

Lim Sareth, a health promotion officer from the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), said 82 government officials and 50 NGO representatives joined the two-day seminar, which discussed strategies for controlling tobacco use in the Kingdom.

At the end of the seminar, officials presented six main strategies for reducing the health impacts of cigarette smoking.

Among these were a higher tax on tobacco products, photographic warning labels on cigarette packages, a blanket ban on tobacco advertising, and public education programmes focusing on the negative effects of tobacco.

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• Tobacco Tax Control Project In Five Southeast Asian Countries 

The Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA) will provide Southeast Asian policymakers with research-based evidence on improving tax systems for tobacco control in five targeted countries.

The research will be funded by a five-year US$7 million (RM23.7 million) grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will focus on tobacco tax control in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Director of the Bangkok-based SEATCA, Bungon Ritthiphakdee said higher taxes on tobacco led to higher prices for tobacco products, which immediately discouraged non-smokers from starting and current smokers from continuing with their harmful habit.

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• Cambodian moms-to-be chew tobacco for nausea 

When pregnant Cambodian women suffer morning sickness, they often reach for an unlikely source of relief: a wad of chewing tobacco.

Many become hooked, and the World Health Organization warned Thursday it is a tradition putting the health of both mothers and babies at risk.

The largest tobacco survey ever conducted in Cambodia found that about half of all women older than 48 regularly chew tobacco, and about one in five rural women first took up the habit during pregnancy, to soothe their prenatal nausea.

The survey conducted by WHO and other researchers found that midwives are the country's biggest users of smokeless tobacco, with 68 percent chewing it. About half of traditional female healers use it as well.

"Chewing tobacco appears to be strongly influenced by beliefs passed on by older relatives," lead author, Dr. Pramil N. Singh from Loma Linda University in California, said in a statement. "The behavior is seen as a rite of passage into womanhood. Further research is needed to find out whether village health workers actively promote its medicinal use."

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Sub-decree orders visual warnings on cigarette packages 

THE Council of Ministers is to make graphic new warning labels on cigarette packages mandatory – part of a plan aimed at combating one of the world’s leading killers.

The visual warning labels will be mandatory on all cigarette packets sold in Cambodia, with the graphics occupying no less than 30 percent of the packaging space, according to a press release from the Council of Ministers, which on Friday adopted a sub-decree ordering the new warnings.

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Indonesia is 'cash cow' for cigarette industry, says SEATCA 

Of South-East Asia's 125 million cigarette smokers some 46 per cent are in Indonesia, the only country in the region that has no legislation banning cigarette advertisements, the South-East Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA) said Monday. The anti-smoking group said Indonesia has become a "cash cow" for Philip Morris International (PMI), the owner of Indonesia's PT HM Sampoerna Company which last year claimed 30 per cent of the Indonesian market and an estimated revenue of 1 billion dollars.

"More profits for Philip Morris means more deaths for us in Asia," SEATCA Senior Policy Advisor Mary Assunta said.

Some 63 per cent of Indonesian men smoke, with an estimated 200,000 dying each year of smoking-related diseases, SEATCA claimed.

SEATCA faulted Indonesia for having the weakest anti-smoking legislation in South-East Asia.

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• Govt targets chewing tobacco 

WHILE the government prepares to tighten its control over cigarettes through new laws on their promotion and labeling, tradition appears to be winning the battle to discourage a different type of tobacco addiction.

"I have never heard that chewing tobacco causes mouth cancer," said Oum Touch, 87, a nun who lives at Wat Lanka who picked up the habit of chewing tobacco from her mother.

Roughly 600,000 women in Cambodia, most middle-aged or older, chew tobacco, while the majority of men prefer to smoke it, according to Dr Yel Daravuth, national officer for the World Health Organisation's Tobacco Free Initiative.

But while most women are aware that smoking is unhealthy, knowledge about the adverse effects of chewing tobacco is still thinly spread.

"Research by the WHO shows that chewing tobacco can cause women to develop lung and mouth cancer," Yel Daravuth said during a workshop earlier this month, calling on the government to initiate education campaigns that warn against the habit.

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Cambodia looks to graphic warnings 

Graphic warning labels will be included on cigarette packs sold in Cambodia starting from next month if the government approves a plan by the Ministry of Health, according to a report in The Phnom Penh Post quoting a government health official.

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• WHO left holding breath for tobacco control law 

Cambodia will not meet a WHO deadline for all cigarette packages sold in the Kingdom to bear graphic health warnings by early 2009 because a law on tobacco control has not yet been passed, says Sung Vinn Tak, head of the tobacco health unit at the National Center for Health Promotion.

The country ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control requiring health warning messages and graphics to appear on cigarette packages in November 2005.

"To try to meet the deadline, we will soon issue a government directive," Sung Vinn Tak said. "We have created the directive to ask all cigarettes companies to comply even though we don't have a law in place yet."

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Cambodia urged to outlaw tobacco ads 

A Cambodian NGO has been honoured by the World Health Organisation for its work on tobacco control. But the WHO also wants Cambodia to honour an obligation to outlaw cigarette ads by 2010.

Presenter: Chhieng Yuth

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• Calls for Cambodia to draft anti-tobacco laws 

An alliance of non-government organisations called the Cambodia Movement for Health are urging the parliament to speed up passage of draft anti-tobacco legislation.

The Mekong Times reports the group is also stressing that stronger tobacco laws won't harm the economy.

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• Lawsuit Limits, General Re, Peregrine in Court News (Update1) 

Japan Tobacco Inc.'s Canadian unit and a former tobacco executive will conclude a hearing tomorrow urging a judge to overturn an order requiring them to stand trial. The company is facing charges it helped defraud the Canadian government of about C$1 billion ($1 billion) in the 1990s by avoiding taxes through cigarette-smuggling operations into the U.S.

The Canadian government has asked Ontario Superior Court Judge Ian Nordheimer at the same hearing to overturn the part of the May 30 ruling and order six other tobacco executives to stand trial.

The case is Regina v. JTI-MacDonald Inc., Ontario Provincial Court (Toronto).

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General Cigar Acquires Havana Honeys Premium Cigar Business 

General Cigar announces today that it has acquired certain assets of Havana Honeys Holdings LLC, a privately-held company that manufactures and markets flavored cigars under the Havana Honeys® brand. Included among the acquired assets are the Havana Honeys trademark as well as inventory and related assets to support the premium cigar segment of Havana Honeys. Terms of the purchase have not been disclosed.

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Illegal cigarette destroyed in Mekong Delta 

More than 71,000 packets of smuggled and counterfeit cigarettes were destroyed Monday in the Mekong Delta province of Long An, the local market management department reports.

With the bust, the total of illegal cigarettes seized this year comes to four million packets nationwide.

Most of the illicit products are under trade name Hero and Jet, smuggled mainly from the neighboring country Cambodia.

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• Tobacco smuggling in 2006 cost nations $40 billion 

The illicit trade in tobacco last year cost governments $40 billion in lost tax revenues and amounted to 10.7 percent of the world trade in cigarettes, experts told a global health conference here Monday.

'Smuggled and counterfeit cigarettes are sold at lower prices than legal products, contributing to higher consumption and greater rates of smoking-related illness and death,' said Luk Joossens, senior policy advisor of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA), in his opening address to a global conference on tobacco-related issues.

'The illicit tobacco trade also deprives governments of billions of dollars of tax revenue reducing funding available for public health and other programmes,' said Joossens.

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• Tobacco control policy to receive enormous support in Cambodia 

A recent survey by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) showed that a tobacco control policy will receive enormous support in Cambodia, local media said on Wednesday.

Over 90 percent interviewers supported the government's adoption of a law on tobacco control, according to the survey of a sample of 144 staff members from the ministries of Education, Youth and Sport, Women's Affairs, and Defense across the country.

It also found that more than 96 percent of the respondents wanted a ban on cigarette advertising, reported Cambodian daily newspaper the Koh Santepheap.

The survey aimed to encourage the government to push for an immediate adoption of such a law, reported another Cambodian daily newspaper the Kampuchea Thmey.

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