By Herbert Vego
IF the Department of Health (DOH) were as efficient in announcing daily cases of lung cancer as it is in shocking us with the “incurable” coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases, all Filipino smokers might have already quit smoking.
What the government does on the pretext of breaking the smoking habit is to impose more taxes. But of course, the real motive is to gain more income for the government.
Based on the DOH’s records, 17,255 Filipinos died of lung cancer (primarily due to smoking) in the year 2018. That’s more than twice the local COVID fatalities so far this year.
Fact is, in the nine months that DOH has been uploading facts and figures about the new disease, the number of COVID fatalities in the Philippines as of yesterday had reached only 7,647, which is a tiny portion of 398,449 cases nationwide.
Well, the above comparison somehow reminds us of various rumors calling the pandemic a “plandemic” with various aims, one of which is to enforce mass vaccination. But that is not what we are about to discuss.
What we are driving us is that the government has never reported on the success or failure of Republic Act No. 11346 – the new law providing for accelerated increases in excise taxes of cigarettes – allegedly to curb cigarette addiction.
Under that law, this year 2020, the government gets an excise tax of P45 per cigarette pack, an additional P5 per pack per year until it reaches P60 in 2023.
That explains why a 20-stick pack of Marlboro now costs Php115 and will cost much more.
DOH Secretary Francisco Duque III had said in the wake of the approval of the law, “More people will be spared from smoking-related diseases and government’s spending for these diseases will be lessened, ultimately giving us more room to focus on our health promotion efforts.”
Duque must have forgotten that previous “sin tax” increases had failed to stop the smoking habit.
People who smell danger simply quit smoking. One of them is Toni “June” Tamayo, the Ilonggo regional director of Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) in Region 5 (Bicol).
The last time he came home to Iloilo, we asked him how he did it.
He answered briefly, “I simply challenged myself to smoke my last stick and really did it.”
I wish my later father had been so determined. He had many times attempted to quit but always resumed. The only time he stopped was when he had caught lung cancer, from which he passed away.
If you are one of those trying to cut back on your number of sticks because you can’t quit outright, the bad news is that halving the number of cigarettes you smoke daily hardly makes a difference in your risk of dying, according to a study made by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, Norway.
“A reduction in cigarette consumption by more than 50 percent,” wrote study author Aage Tveral, “is not associated with a markedly lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or smoking-related cancer.”
The study included over 51,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 34, who were monitored twice over a period of 20 years.
The participants were grouped according to their smoking history. There were those who never smoked and ex-smokers. But among those who began the study as smokers, there were quitters (stopped smoking over the course of the study), moderate smokers (1-14 cigarettes daily), reducers (started the study while smoking 15 or more cigarettes but cut that number by half) and heavy smokers (15 or more cigarettes a day).
Over the course of the study, the researchers found that there was no difference in the number of smoking-related deaths between the heavy smokers and the reducers.
Tveral wrote that as a result of his findings, doctors and other health educators should make sure that patients understand that cutting back is not nearly the same as quitting.
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ON POWER INTERRUPTIONS
WHY does power interruptions still occur in Iloilo City despite the ongoing modernization of the facilities of MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power)? We relayed these questions to the company’s PR department.
We learned that being a mere energy distributor, MORE Power merely conveys electricity from various sources to end users.
Second, unscheduled, or scheduled brownouts may occur. The “unscheduled” ones refer to power outages caused by accidents and unforeseen circumstances. Last Saturday (Nov. 7) for instance, a 15-minute trip off was triggered by the electrocution of a bird at takeoff tower near the Lapaz substation.
Unscheduled brownouts, on the other hand, are aimed at preventing accidents and major breakdowns. This coming Saturday (Nov. 14), for instance, MORE technicians will replace old and dilapidated poles with concrete ones between 6:00 a.m. and 12:00 noon.
MORE Power maintains a Facebook page where announcements are posted 24/7. It also receives messages and complaints from customers.
