Build the society through nationbuilding endeavours of healthy youths

 

May 31

 

MYANMAR people prefer to smoke cheroots and cigarettes made of tobacco products and pipes and chew betel quads in their spare time. Truly, these are additional costs for their lifestyle, wasting their incomes they hardly earned. Such a point is enough for discarding these habits.

 

Member states of the World Health Organization set the World No-Tobacco Day on 31 May 1987 to draw global attention to the tobacco epidemic and the preventable death and disease it causes. This yearly celebration informs the public on the dangers of using tobacco, the business practices of tobacco companies, what the World Health Organization (WHO) is doing to fight against the use of tobacco, and what people around the world can do to claim their right to health and healthy living and to protect future generations.

 

The day is further intended to draw attention to the widespread prevalence of tobacco use and to negative health effects, which currently lead to more than 8 million deaths each year worldwide, including 1.2 million as the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. The day has been met with both enthusiasm and resistance around the globe from governments, public health organizations, smokers, growers, and the tobacco industry.

 

Smokers may face some 10 ten years shorter than non-smokers in their longevity. Due to the content of nicotine in the cigarettes, smokers can suffer from a kind of chronic diseases. Moreover, smokers may face damage to respiratory tracts and cells, genetically change, cancers, artery, oral, lung, blood and urine problems, raising 25-30 times heart attack.

 

Based on the statistics, Myanmar annually loses some K2.6 trillion in its economic sector, accounting for 3.3 per cent of the GDP in 2016 because of abusing tobacco products. As a nature of Myanmar society, some youths of student age smoke cigarettes and cheroots and chew betel quads. It is because those youths follow the behaviours of adults and elder persons who also smoke cheroots and chew betel quads as traditions.

 

Actually, such behaviours as smoking and chewing betel quads are inappropriate for health conditions. Hence, elder persons should avoid their moves of smoking and betel quid chewing and urge the youths not to do so in order to improve their health conditions so as to establish a healthy society. If so, the nation would be brighter with nation-building endeavours of healthy youths. GNLM