Paulina Quintao – The Ministry of Health has begun a campaign to raise awareness of the context of draft laws to control the sale and use of cigarettes in order to get ideas about how to improve the laws which are to be brought before the Council of Ministers for approval.

Deputy Minister of Health Ethics and Service Achievements Natalia de Araujo said this year, the ministry will give priority to the elaboration of the law to control cigarettes in Timor-Leste as the country signed and ratified the International Convention on the Control of Cigarettes in 2014.

She added even though Timor-Leste does not manufacture cigarettes, cigarettes are imported to Timor-Leste, the low cost of which make them easily accessible to consumers.

She said this law will legally empower the relevant institutions to intervene.

It will allow the Ministry of Finance to increase import taxes on cigarettes, as well as allow the government to regulate cigarette advertising and prohibit smoking in public places to lessen the effects of secondhand smoke.

Resident Manuel Sales said the government was obliged to protect its people. He said the proposed legislation would control cigarette circulation in Timor-Leste. "However the important thing is its implementation," he said.

Chief of the Department of Non-infection Diseases Herculano Seixas dos Santos said statistics from the 2012 annual health report showed that non-infectious diseases accounted for 17.193 hospitalizations in six Timorese referral hospitals.

This was 49.9 per cent of all hospitalizations, he said. He said 262 people died due to chronic smoking-related diseases such as hypertension, cancers or respiration diseases. This was 22,2 per cent of all deaths in hospital.

"Although smoking does not cause a person to die immediately, it causes people to get diseases and people die from those diseases," he said.

Source: http://www.thediliweekly.com/en/news/news/12384-awareness-campaign-for-draft-cigarette-control-laws