Note: World Lung Foundation united with The Union North America. From January 2016, the combined organization is known as “Vital Strategies.”
(December 17th, 2015, Phnom Penh, Cambodia and New York, USA): The Government of Cambodia’s National Centre for Health Promotion (NCHP) today launched a powerful national mass media campaign to warn people about the deadly harms of secondhand smoke (SHS) to children and to build support for a comprehensive national law to ban smoking in public places and workplaces. The campaign is based on a Public Service Announcement (PSA) entitled “Tobacco Is Eating Your Baby Alive,” which uses graphic imagery to highlight that a baby or child’s exposure to tobacco smoke can cause pneumonia, crippling asthma, painful ear infection, miscarriage and low birth weight among new-borns. The campaign was developed with technical and financial support from World Lung Foundation (WLF), who today congratulated NCHP on the launch of the campaign.
“Tobacco Is Eating Your Baby Alive” opens with the silhouettes of a man and a woman smoking cigarettes in front of a child and the child inhaling SHS into its lungs. As images of children suffering tobacco-related illness in Cambodia are screened, a voiceover explains that SHS contains poisonous chemicals like cyanide and carbon monoxide that cause serious health problems. The PSA ends by urging smokers to quit smoking to protect themselves and their loved ones from the harms of tobacco and SHS. A research study in Cambodia found that exposure to this PSA increased awareness of the harms of tobacco and intention to protect children from SHS.
The campaign aims to reach 95 percent of smokers in Cambodia. Both 15-second and 30-second versions of “Tobacco Is Eating Your Baby Alive” will be broadcast on Cambodia’s main TV channels, including CTN, MYTV, HMTV, TVB and SEATV. The PSA, which is recorded in the Khmer language, will run for two months from today. The campaign will also run on billboards in areas of Phnom Penh with heavy pedestrian traffic, as mobile ads on tuk-tuks in four provinces: Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Battambang and Kampong, and on posters across the country.
Commenting on the launch of the campaign Dr. Chhea Chhor Daphea, Director of the National Centre for Health Promotion, said: “Secondhand smoke has severe impacts on the health of non-smokers, particularly children and other vulnerable individuals. We need to effectively regulate indoor smoking to protect the health of non-smokers and know that Cambodia’s citizens support such a law.”
“No-one wants secondhand smoke in any public place. That is why as many as 84 percent of people in Cambodia urge the government to ban smoking in restaurants, 87 percent support smokefree laws in workplaces and 87 percent want public transport to be smokefree,” agreed Dr. Mom Kong, the Executive Director of Cambodia Movement for Health.
Dr. Yel Daravuth, World Health Organization added: “As a signatory to WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Cambodia is obliged to protect non-smokers from exposure to secondhand smoke. Yet current rates of exposure are alarmingly high: 76 percent of people report being exposed to secondhand smoke in restaurants and food courts and around 50 percent of people report being exposed to secondhand smoke at work. This is an urgent public health problem which needs to be addressed.”
Sandra Mullin, Senior Vice President, Policy, Advocacy and Communication, World Lung Foundation concluded: “We congratulate the NCHP on the launch of this powerful new campaign, which is based upon a concept already proven to be effective in over 20 countries. It delivers clear results in increasing awareness of the harms of smoking and secondhand smoke to smokers and to children and increases intention to quit – changing opinions and behavior to benefit health. We are confident that this campaign will help health advocates in Cambodia to make the case for the rapid implementation of a well-supported national smokefree law.”
The burden of tobacco use in Cambodia
The Tobacco Atlas notes that more than 2,309,000 adults and more than 1,000 children continue to use tobacco each day in Cambodia. This includes 42 percent of men and 4 percent of women – more than the average across other low-income countries. Every year, more than 10,400 of Cambodia’s people are killed by tobacco-caused disease. Tobacco is responsible for 16.2 percent of adult male deaths and 8.1 percent of adult female deaths – more than the average across other middle-income countries. The higher proportion of tobacco-related deaths among women in Cambodia (compared with the proportion of adult female tobacco users) suggests that women suffer a disproportionate burden of death and disease from exposure to SHS. According to The Tobacco Atlas, SHS increases the risks of contracting lung cancer by 30 percent (small cell lung cancer by 300 percent) and coronary heart disease by 25 percent. Exposure to SHS killed more than 600,000 non-smokers globally in 2010 from causes of death including ischemic heart disease, lower respiratory infections, asthma, and lung cancers.
Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of mortality in the world today, and is responsible for more than five million deaths each year—one in ten preventable deaths worldwide. A further 600,000 people are estimated to die from exposure to SHS. Research has shown mass media campaigns are one of the most effective means to prompt people to stop smoking, and mass media campaigns is one of the World Health Organization’s M-P-O-W-E-R (W=Warn) strategies to reduce tobacco consumption. MPOWER strategies are endorsed and promoted by the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, of which World Lung Foundation is a principal partner.
The “Tobacco is Eating Your Baby Alive” PSA and stills and transcripts from the PSA are available upon request.