The Department of Health (DOH) will debut on Sunday its most “hard-hitting” effort yet to discourage Filipinos from smoking.
The campaign, dubbed “Mahalin ang sarili at pamilya, paninigarilyo itigil na! (Love yourself and your family, quit smoking now),” will air over TV and social media channels.
The 30-second video shows the emotional and social impacts of tobacco use on a child, who is forced to quit school after her father falls ill to a tobacco-related disease.
Health Secretary Paulyn Ubial said the multimedia campaign would appeal to smokers to quit the habit and reduce tobacco-related illnesses in the country.
Ubial said that while tobacco use had declined to 23.8 percent last year from 29.5 percent of the population in 2009, there were still an estimated 80,000 Filipinos dying annually from tobacco-related illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, chronic lung disease and diabetes.
Kaloi Garcia, communications manager of Vital Strategies which created the video, said a “hard-hitting media campaign” was necessary to bring home the message that tobacco is dangerous not only to its users but also to those around them.
Ubial said that along with stricter legislation, campaigns such as this were needed to reduce the preventable deaths
related to tobacco use and smoking.
She noted that the “tobacco epidemic” in developed countries, such as the United States, had been reversed because of efforts such as the imposition of a graphic health warning, a ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship, raising taxes on tobacco, and media campaigns on tobacco illnesses.
“It’s a multipronged approach. And it has proven [effective] to reverse the effects of [tobacco use] in developed countries,” she said.
Ubial, however, is not inclined to encourage smokers to turn to e-cigarettes as an alternative to tobacco, saying this was still a nicotine-delivery device.
“As we all know, nicotine is the No. 1 cause of the harmful effects of tobacco use,” Ubial told a press briefing on Friday. She added that while the other substances found in e-cigarettes were still being studied, this remained “harmful to the individual.”
The health chief also pointed out that because the e-cigarette was a relatively new technology, its effects on secondhand users has also yet to be established.
A recent survey of adult Filipino smokers showed that 70 percent saw e-cigarettes as a “positive alternative” to tobacco products “if they were legal, met quality and safety standards, and were conveniently available.”
E-cigarettes are “encouraged” by Public Health England, which said the device had become the most popular aid to quit smoking tobacco.
Asked about the DOH’s plans to ensure that smokers who had quit tobacco use would not fall back to their old ways, Ubial said they had capacitated their frontline health workers and nurses “to provide advice and counseling.”