The Ministry of Education said it was set to launch a three-year “no betel nut” campaign on school campuses after a recent Department of Health survey showed that about 140,000 teenagers had chewed betel nuts at some point.
Fu Wei-wei (傅瑋瑋), director of the ministry’s Department of Physical Education, said last week that the ministry had earmarked NT$40 million (US$1.2 million) for a health campaign in the nation’s schools.
The ministry would require that schools in the 100 townships with the highest oral cancer rates teach their students about the health risks associated with chewing betel nuts after the new school year begins next month, he said.
HIGHEST RATES
Statistics from the ministry’s Bureau of Health Promotion show that some of the townships with the highest rates of oral cancer were in Taitung, Hualien, Miaoli, Hsinchu, Taoyuan and Pingtung counties.
The campaign was prompted by data from the bureau in 2008 and last year that showed 6.2 percent of the nation’s junior high school students and 12.5 percent of high school and vocational high school students had tried betel nut.
EXPERIMENTATION
Among the junior high students who had consumed betel nut, about 29 percent had tried betel nut for the first time when they were aged seven, while 64 percent did so before they had reached the age of 12.
The majority said the betel nuts were provided by classmates or parents, the survey showed.
The data also showed that about 40,000 out of the 1.7 million junior high, senior high and vocational high school students in Taiwan were still chewing betel nut.
Last year, research by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Hospital showed that people who chew betel nut were 28 times more likely to develop oral cancer. This went up to 89 times if the practice was coupled with smoking, and 123 times if the person smoked and drank alcohol.
Additional reporting by Staff Writer
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