The number of smokers in Taiwan has been falling for years, but flavored and electronic cigarettes are tempting young people to try smoking and harming their health, while also exposing them to secondhand smoke, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said on Friday.
Smoking among junior-high school students dropped from 7.8 percent to 2.8 percent from 2008 to last year and from 14.8 percent to 8 percent among senior-high school students, the agency said in a statement.
That reflects a trend across Taiwan of fewer people smoking, it said, adding that the smoking rate among adults decreased from 21.9 percent to 13 percent.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
However, four out of 10 teenagers smoke flavored cigarettes, with more girls using the products than boys, and it is estimated that more than 38,000 minors smoke e-cigarettes, the HPA said, citing last year’s Taiwan Global Youth Tobacco Survey.
Such alternative tobacco products are a “sugar-coated poison,” the agency said, adding that their flavors and attractive designs might create the false impression that they are relatively harmless or less addictive than traditional cigarettes, but both products contain nicotine and can harm people’s health.
Research shows that e-cigarettes not only can cause cancer, asthma and strokes, but might also explode, HPA Director-General Wang Ying-wei (王英偉) said.
The annual survey found that about 30 percent of teenagers are exposed to secondhand smoke at home, with half of them exposed to cigarette smoke on a daily basis, the HPA said.
Secondhand smoke is harmful to children’s health, Wang said, urging adults and parents to give up smoking to ensure a safe and healthy family environment.
“One person smoking means the whole family is smoking,” he said.
Smoking indoors is also a main cause of air pollution at home, with the concentration of PM2.5 pollutants rising to 10 times the level if there is a smoker at home, he added.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,