HEALTH
The Way to Save Millions of Lives Is to Prevent Smoking By Michael R. Bloomberg
Every day around the world, tragedies occur that are entirely avoidable: siblings burying siblings, spouses burying spouses, and children burying parents-all of them dying before their time. What is the leading cause of these preventable deaths? Is it tuberculosis? AIDS? Malaria? Each receives a great deal of media coverage along with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding-and rightfully so. But there is another deadly epidemix that kills more people than all three diseases combined, and until recently, it received almost no public attention: tobacco use.
Tobacco has become the world's leading cause of death. How many deaths are we talking about? Picture a college basketball arena filled to capacity. Roughly that many people-14,000-die every single day from smoking tobacco. If we do nothing, tobacco may kill 1 billion people by the end of this century.
But only if we do nothing.
In New York, we have seen how effective anti-smoking programs can be. In 2002, I signed a law prohibiting smoking in all workplaces, There was a huge outcry, but then somthing happened: people loved it. Bars and restaurants saw their businesss increase. Waitresses kissed me and told me I had saved their lives. And pretty soon, cities and states around the country-along with England, Ireland, France, Italy and other countries with high rates of smoking-began passing similar laws. Along with the smoking bam, we raised cigarette taxes in New York, ran hard-hitting public-education campaigns and provided free nicotine patches. The result? After 10 years of seeing no decline in smoking, we've cut smoking rates by 21 percent-and we've cut teen smoking by more than 50 percent. There are 300,000 fewer smokers in New York City than there were six years ago.
While tobacco use is now declining in New York and some industrialized nations, though, it is growing in countries like Russia and Indonesia. More than 80 percent of tobacco deaths in the coming decades will be in developing countries , including China and India. But in talking to philanthropists and public-health experts, I realized that public-health dollars were tied up fighting other causes of death, and almost no funding existed for fighting tobacco.
Two years ago, I decided to change that. Building on an international tobacco-control treaty, I committed $125 million to a new global effort to reduce tobacco use (since raised to $375 million). Bill and Melinda Gates have joined this effort with their own $125 million commitment. And in partnership with the World Health Organization, we have developed a strategy called MPOWER, which includes six solutions that have been proved to save lives....
I read the rest of the article in the magazine but you can read it here:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/160072
Every day around the world, tragedies occur that are entirely avoidable: siblings burying siblings, spouses burying spouses, and children burying parents-all of them dying before their time. What is the leading cause of these preventable deaths? Is it tuberculosis? AIDS? Malaria? Each receives a great deal of media coverage along with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding-and rightfully so. But there is another deadly epidemix that kills more people than all three diseases combined, and until recently, it received almost no public attention: tobacco use.
Tobacco has become the world's leading cause of death. How many deaths are we talking about? Picture a college basketball arena filled to capacity. Roughly that many people-14,000-die every single day from smoking tobacco. If we do nothing, tobacco may kill 1 billion people by the end of this century.
But only if we do nothing.
In New York, we have seen how effective anti-smoking programs can be. In 2002, I signed a law prohibiting smoking in all workplaces, There was a huge outcry, but then somthing happened: people loved it. Bars and restaurants saw their businesss increase. Waitresses kissed me and told me I had saved their lives. And pretty soon, cities and states around the country-along with England, Ireland, France, Italy and other countries with high rates of smoking-began passing similar laws. Along with the smoking bam, we raised cigarette taxes in New York, ran hard-hitting public-education campaigns and provided free nicotine patches. The result? After 10 years of seeing no decline in smoking, we've cut smoking rates by 21 percent-and we've cut teen smoking by more than 50 percent. There are 300,000 fewer smokers in New York City than there were six years ago.
While tobacco use is now declining in New York and some industrialized nations, though, it is growing in countries like Russia and Indonesia. More than 80 percent of tobacco deaths in the coming decades will be in developing countries , including China and India. But in talking to philanthropists and public-health experts, I realized that public-health dollars were tied up fighting other causes of death, and almost no funding existed for fighting tobacco.
Two years ago, I decided to change that. Building on an international tobacco-control treaty, I committed $125 million to a new global effort to reduce tobacco use (since raised to $375 million). Bill and Melinda Gates have joined this effort with their own $125 million commitment. And in partnership with the World Health Organization, we have developed a strategy called MPOWER, which includes six solutions that have been proved to save lives....
I read the rest of the article in the magazine but you can read it here:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/160072
