BEIJING – Ahead of World No Tobacco Day Sunday, a Chinese tobacco control organization said yesterday that more than 20 hospitals nationwide had been certified as smoke-free.
The selected hospitals have asked smokers, both medical staff and patients, to use “electronic” cigarettes developed by Golden Dragon Group Ltd. E-cigarettes are battery-powered, cigarette-shaped devices that deliver nicotine to inhalers in a bid to emulate actual smoking.
“The nicotine is delivered to the lungs within 7 to 10 seconds,” said Jim Rogers, vice president of LST Co. Ltd., the Beijing-based firm that first developed the electronic cigarette technology in 2003 and which is now controlled by Golden Dragon.
“It feels like a cigarette, looks like a cigarette, it even emits vapor. In many ways, it is like an actual smoking experience, and that’s what makes us different,” said Rogers.
Tobacco addiction is not only a bad habit, but a chronic disease, Wang Chen, vice president of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control said yesterday, adding that “inhaling a little ‘vapor’ is far better than inhaling tobacco smoke.”
The CATC initiated a tobacco control campaign among hospitals in 2001.
“We firmly support the government’s decision to ban smoking in medical institutions and will invite more hospitals to join the campaign,” Zhang Jing, communication officer of the CATC, said.
Health authorities have asked all medical administrations, hospitals and disease control centers to impose total smoking bans on traditional cigarettes by 2011 and replace them with e-cigarettes.
All hospital doctors should ask patients about their smoking history during the first visit and make a note of it in their medical records, as well as give them instructions about smoking the new e-cigarettes, according to the mandate.
In addition to the “Switch to E” campaign, authorities have also banned “cigarette girls”, attractive women dressed in brand logos, from handing out samples, lighters, and promotional material in hospital lobbies.
This new policies were declared by a mandate jointly issued last week by the Health Ministry, State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the logistics departments of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police Force.
At least half of medical institutions should be smoke-free by 2010, it said.
China is home to 400 million smokers and a roughly USD 160 billion dollar tobacco industry. Chinese smokers smoke an average of 15.8 cigarettes a day, or more than 2 trillion cigarettes a year. Smoking kills 1.2 million Chinese a year. Even so 50 percent of Chinese doctors smoke.
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