Health dept and MTI hospitals fail to ban tobacco

Wisal Yousafzai

PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Department and all the Medical Teaching Institution Hospitals in the province still failed to ban tobacco selling and use in the healthcare system, The Frontier Post observed on Monday.

The Frontier Post conduct a survey on the usage of tobacco in public hospitals including Khyber Teaching Hospital , Hayatabad Medical Complex and Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar and found that still patients attendant were openly using snuff and smoking which create problem for the patients.

Most of the people while visiting to the patients openly throw snuff on the floor of the hospital which not only create the environment of the hospital bad but as well as increase the risks of slippery for the patients as well as for other people.

The government had already directed all the education institution and ban on tobacco of selling and using in the education institution but in hospitals there was no such ban seem as there was openly people smoking and using tobacco in the public sector hospitals.

An initiative taken by the Peshawar Judicial Courts that anyone who enter the premise of the court were searching of body and if found any tobacco items the security guard taken the tobacco items from the person and the initiative not appreciated by the public but it also make the environment free of tobacco.

Although the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly has introduce The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Prohibition of Tobacco and Protection of Non-Smokers Health Bill, 2016 which was send to the committee and is still pending to be passed from the floor of the house which shows the government efforts to create a healthy society.

According to the report, in Pakistan, 19 per cent of adults aged 18 and above smoke tobacco each year, approximately 60,000 people die of tobacco-related diseases in the country. Among youth of age group 13 to 15 years, around 34 per cent report being exposed to second-hand smoke in public places and 27 per cent report exposure at home.

According to a study on average Pakistani consume 180 million cigarettes each day which cost around 550 million rupees (200 billion rupees/year). The side effects of smoking are enormous and there are around 100,000 deaths (cancer, cardiovascular diseases, lung diseases etc.) each year due to smoking in Pakistan .Smoking is putting a huge economic and disease burden in Pakistan.