Images of diseased gums and cancerous lungs along with anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packages have had an effect on smokers in Singapore, a survey said yesterday.
Twenty-eight percent of the 650 smokers queried said they smoked fewer cigarettes and seven in 10 said they knew more about the effects of smoking on health, according to the Health Promotion Board findings.
The participants in the survey, which also included 650 non-smokers, were aged between 18 and 69.
The warnings, introduced in August 2004, carry six images: Diseased gums, a cancerous lung, a dying baby, a brain oozing blood, a patient on his deathbed and a family suffering from second-hand smoke.
They come with such warnings as, "Smoking causes strokes," and "Smoking causes lung cancer."
The average number of callers to the board's Quitline increased from 100 prior to the warnings and images to 300 a month since they were introduced.
Half of the 650 non-smokers said the warnings prompted them to try and get smokers to kick the habit.
A new set of warnings is currently being tested with a panel of smokers.
Singapore has tough anti-smoking laws. Smoking and tobacco advertising are banned in enclosed areas and tobacco is heavily taxed.
Starting in July, coffee shops and hawker centers will only be allowed small smoking zones.
By next year, entertainment outlets, including bars and clubs, will also have to limit smoking to designated spaces.
Singapore has an international reputation for social engineering, and keeps a close check on an array of public activities.
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
DARK WARNINGS: If Trump survives his court trials, neither the Supreme Court nor the US Constitution could stop him from becoming president for life, a ‘Post’ column said Former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to rule out abusing power if he returns to the White House after Fox News host Sean Hannity asked him to respond to growing criticism of his rhetoric. The Republican presidential front-runner has talked about targeting his rivals — referring to them as “vermin” — and vowed to seek retribution if he wins a second term for what he argues are politically motivated prosecutions against him. As Trump has dominated the Republican presidential primary, US President Joe Biden has stepped up his own warnings, contending that Trump is “determined to destroy American democracy.” “Under no
Seventeen people died and 11 were injured when a passenger bus careered off a road on a “killer curve” and plunged down a mountain in the central Philippines, officials said yesterday. The bus was traveling in Hamtic municipality in Antique province when the crash happened on Tuesday afternoon, Antique Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office head Roderick Train said. Seven people were in critical condition in a hospital and four others were stable, Train said, describing the section of road as “accident prone.” One Kenyan national was among those killed, and a second Kenyan was among those critically injured. The bus, which came from
RSS