In observation of World No Tobacco Day, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) yesterday reiterated calls for smokers to seek professional assistance in helping quitting the potentially fatal addiction, which the agency said kills one person every 25 minutes in the nation.
“More than 20,000 people die each year from smoking-related diseases in the nation, meaning every 25 minutes someone is killed by health hazards related to tobacco,” HPA Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) said.
Chiou also described cigarettes as the nation’s “top economic killer,” which she said costs Taiwan NT$144.1 billion (US$4.7 billion) per year, including NT$50 billion in National Health Insurance expenses, representing 1.06 percent of GDP.
Research showed that the rate of successful smoking cessation among people who attempt to quit by themselves is 5 percent lower than those who seek professional assistance, Chiou said.
Citing statistics, she said about 27.1 percent of smokers who turned to the administration’s second-generation Smoking Cessation Program remained smoke-free for six months.
“The success rate is even higher for individuals who call our free smoke-cessation hotline, 0800-636-363, which was the first of its kind in Asia when it was launched in 2003. About 39.5 percent of callers were able to keep themselves from using tobacco for six months or longer,” Chiou said.
“The numbers suggest that willpower alone is not enough to quit smoking,” she added.
Smokers who turn to the Smoking Cessation Program for help are only required to pay a medical registration fee, which ranges from NT$50 to NT$250 per visit, and 20 percent of the cost of medication, with a cap of NT$200 per prescription.
The hotline is attended by psychological counseling and tobacco cessation experts who have provided professional knowledge to 120,000 people and have helped nearly 50,000 people to successfully quit smoking, Chiou said.
Separately yesterday, the antismoking John Tung Foundation urged the government to resume a licensing program for cigarette retailers and called on the public to report any tobacco products of questionable origin.
“Before Taiwan joined the WTO in 2002, only retailers that held a tobacco license were allowed to sell cigarettes. The abolition of this system has made people more vulnerable to unknowingly purchasing illegal tobacco products,” the foundation said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching