|
Swiss
burn effigy for "World No Tobacco Day"
Singapore store gives candy instead of smokes
by
JONATHAN FOWLER
The Associated Press
June 01, 2001
GENEVA
--- Children set fire to a Marlboro Man-style effigy as a band
played country music in this Swiss city, and a chain store in
Singapore handed out candies instead of cigarettes, as part
of events Thursday to highlight the danger of tobacco.
Warnings about secondhand smoke appeared in official news outlets
in China, the world's biggest consumer and producer of cigarettes
and in Cuba, the Caribbean nation famous for its cigars.
"The
truth is out -- tobacco kills" said World Health Organization
Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland, marking the annual World
No Tobacco Day. "What you now need to know is that tobacco
kills non-smokers as well." Brundtland said, people
should do more to speak out against secondhand smoke, which she
said affects about 700 million people worldwide, and to lobby for
a ban on smoking in public places.
"Bans
put the emphasis on people's right to health and help to make
smoking the exception rather than the norm," she told dozens
of children in a busy street in downtown Geneva where a
"cowboy Bob" cigarette-advertising effigy was set in
flames and a country music band played. In an attempt to
knock the appeal out of Marlboro Man-style advertisements, WHO has
used the cowboy-on-horseback image on its anti-smoking posters,
emblazoned with the caption: Bob, I've got cancer."
The
U.N. agency estimates that 10 million people a year will die from
tobacco- related diseases by 2030, more than 70 percent of them
from the developing world. The toll now is about 4 million.
World No Tobacco Day, which WHO began in 1989, is held annually on
May 31. In this year's events, smokers in Singapore were
given candies when they tried to buy cigarettes in the Cold
Storage supermarket chain.
A
record 515 shops, nightclubs and pubs in the wealthy Southeast
Asian city-state refused to sell tobacco products on Thursday, up
from 284 last year. About 15 percent of Singapore's 4 million
people smoke cigarettes. The Polish Parliament received a
WHO award for its anti-smoking legislation which banned tobacco
advertising in November 1999. The country once had one of the
world's highest smoking rates -- 62 percent of men and 30 percent
of women in 1982 -- but has seen rates fall to about 40 percent of
men and 20 percent of women.
"Secondhand
smoke kills. Let's clear the air," was the message delivered
in China. There are an estimated 320 million smokers in China --
67 percent of all men and 4 percent of women.
This
story was located at:
Las Vegas Review Journal
(Back
to Index)
|
