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Tobacco pin-pointed as big marital spoiler 

Revelations that smoking is a source of marital problems besides the commonly known medical one of causing cancerous diseases, shocked the audience at a function focused on the effects of tobacco, which was held in Dar es Salaam on Friday.

The audience comprised mostly members of the Tanzania Tobacco Control Forum (TTCF), who assembled at the Karimjee Hall for the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the NGO, which is on the forefront in the battle to curb the growth and use of a crop that destabilises health, kills, drains lots of funds, slows down human welfare and destroys the environment.

The TTCF Executive Secretary, Lutgard Kagaruki, said research conducted in Namtumbo, Ruvuma Region - a major tobacco cultivation area - showed that loss of sexual potency by men was one of the ugly by-products, which often led to divorces.

Nearly 75 per cent of peasants there smoke raw tobacco and have respiratory diseases; and some 1,500 out-of-school children in the 8-17 age bracket labour on tobacco farms.

On a happy note, however, she told the audience that steadily, many cultivators, who were not prospering but driven into destitution instead due to low prices and debt bondage through being loaned inputs like fertiliser, were abandoning the crop

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