Guyana observes World No Tobacco Day

Today, Guyana joined the rest of the world to raise awareness about the dangers of using tobacco and tobacco products on the occasion of World No Tobacco Day.

During his daily COVID-19 update, Minster of Health, Hon. Dr. Frank Anthony said the Government has implemented several measures to reduce tobacco use.

“In Guyana, we have been able to pass legislation to deal with smoking. What we have to do is to make sure that those things that are in the legislation are enforced, so as to reduce the consumption of tobacco products…

We also have been working very closely with the Tobacco Convention as we are a member of that body.”

Additionally, the Ministry has been hosting several training programmes particularly on chronic diseases.

“This is one of the areas that we have been looking at because smoking, as we all know, is a risk factor to so many things, including cardiovascular diseases and other diseases.

We know there’s a direct linkage between smoking and lung cancer and other forms of cancer like cancers in the throat and so forth. Therefore, we really want to encourage people to quit smoking.”

The Ministry has adapted the World Health Organization’s (WHO) MPOWER method: ‘M’ stands for ‘monitoring tobacco use and prevention policies’, ‘P’- protect people from tobacco smoke, ‘O’ – offer help to quit tobacco use, ‘W’ – warn about the dangers of tobacco, ‘E’- enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship and ‘R’ – raise taxes on tobacco.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Minister Anthony said smokers are more at risk of developing severe forms of the disease.

“We know that the more popular way of the virus entering someone’s body is through the upper respiratory tract meaning the nose and the mouth, and then it goes down into the lungs.

Smokers generally because of their condition, if they’ve been smoking for a long time, they would have some amount of damage in their lung tissue and so COVID-19, it just complicates this whole process in the lung because when the virus gets into your lung, it attaches on the storage receptors and alarm, and with smokers you will have more challenges,” he said.

This year, World No Tobacco Day is observed under the theme “Commit to Quit”.