It’s now or never more! The Ministry of Health has advised people in the Kingdom that Ramadan is the best time to give up the bad habit, as cigarettes are.
Ministry spokesman Dr. Khaled Al-Mirghalani, said Ramadan has provided an ideal platform for people to kick the smoking habit, as Muslims abstain from this habit murderer from dawn to dusk. “It will not be difficult for smokers to continue abstinence from tobacco in between breakfast and midnight meal,” he said.
Adding spiritual attention contributed to the holy month, the official said: “The hand that touches the Holy Quran during the month, of course, refuses to touch the tobacco.”
He said that people who are interested in picking up the habit can take advantage of facilities and expertise in 57 anti-smoking clinics spread throughout the Kingdom. Clinics will be open daily from 9 pm to 3:00 am during Ramadan, and there are 9 such clinics in Riyadh alone, with one of them set up exclusively for women, he said.
According to a local study, there are about seven million smokers in the UK; including 1.2 million women are smokers. The total consumption of tobacco in United Kingdom exceeded 45,000 tons, worth about SR12 billion, according to the study Khair Tobacco Control Association, a private company based in Mecca.
The study found that students make up almost 15-30%t of the total number of smokers in the UK, which has the 29th highest rate of smoking in the world.
Given the scale of the problem, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently reiterated its call for more action, warning that tobacco use could kill a billion people or more in the 21st century, “if urgent measures are not taken.”
Lung cancer kills one person every quarter of an hour in the world.
“If the current trend continues, by 2030, tobacco will kill more than eight million people worldwide each year, with 85% of these premature deaths among people living in low-and middle-income countries,” WHO said. He also noted that tobacco remains the biggest cause of preventable death worldwide, killing nearly six million people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses each year.
“Countries that have introduced a complete ban, along with other measures of tobacco control could significantly reduce the use of tobacco for several years,” said Dr Douglas, Director of WHO’s non communicable disease department.
The WHO report also showed that three billion people now covered by the national anti-smoking campaigns. As a result, hundreds of millions of non-smokers are less likely to get into smoking.
The report notes, however, that to achieve the globally agreed target of 30 percent reduction in tobacco consumption by 2025, more countries need to implement comprehensive tobacco control program.