Plain cigarette packaging is not on the cards anytime soon for Hong Kong, but there is to be a program for kids to help parents quit smoking.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Plain cigarette packaging is not on the cards anytime soon for Hong Kong, but there is to be a program for kids to help parents quit smoking.
That was the word from Director of Health Lam Ping-yan as he explained that a watch will be kept on how Australia does with its world- first effort to see all brands of cigarettes in the same drab but alarming packets.
The priority for Hong Kong just now, Lam said, is to introduce more quit-smoking clinics and increase efforts at the ones already in operation.
The Department of Health currently runs six clinics on its own or through joint efforts, and funding will be increased for more services in clinics at Tung Wah and Pok Oi hospitals.
“We’ll also involve the Po Leung Kuk for a school-based program so that children can go home and ask their parents to quit,” Lam said.
In addition, “there is a program for ethnic minorities, and we will finance a hotline service run by University of Hong Kong professors.”
On Australia’s packaging program, the head of the country’s Department of Health and Ageing, Jane Halton, noted that legislation on packaging has yet to clear the Senate.
“Obviously, the tobacco companies are not happy with this, but the legislation has passed the House of Representatives,” she said.
“It’s our belief that we have the numbers for it to pass the Senate. So this will be implemented in 2012.”
The packaging plan, she added, is a major step “in making sure that smoking is in no way glamorized or promoted in Australia – and particularly for young people.”
The packets that will appear if the new law is cleared will be a dull olive color and feature health warnings and photographs of the ill effects of smoking plus a line for the brand.
Photographs on the packs, it is stressed, will be of real people suffering from the effects of smoking-related diseases.
“We will make sure that the images we use are rotated every six months so people don’t get used to seeing them,” Halton said. “We have seven images for use in the first phase.” MARY ANN BENITEZ