China faces challenges
Smoking less but better
About 6.9 percent of Chinese teenagers smoke tobacco and 19.9 percent of them have tried smoking at least once, according to a story in The Global Times quoting a health department official and citing the news website chinanews.com.
The story said also that 180 million children in the country had been harmed by passive smoking, without defining what was meant by a child.
Habits acquired during teenage years could leave their mark on a person’s whole life, said Li Nong, deputy director of the publicity department at the National Health Commission. Efforts to control smoking among teenagers should be stepped up.
Eighteen cities had imposed smoking bans in public places, but controlling the habit in China faced challenges, Li said.
The country’s target of reducing the smoking rate among people over 15 years of age to less than 20 percent by 2030 still had a long way to go.
The deputy director of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control, Liao Wenke, said innovative education methods, which teenagers could and were willing to accept, should be initiated to educate them about the harmful effects of smoking.
As of March 2018, the public-places smoking-incidence in Shanghai dropped by nearly nine percentage points (from 25.1 percent to 16.3 percent) after the introduction of a ban in all enclosed public spaces in March 2017.