Ramadan ideal month to quit smoking, says Health Ministry official

It is now or never! The Ministry of Health has advised people in the Kingdom that Ramadan is the best time to give up the cancer stick, as cigarettes are referred to.
The ministry’s spokesman, Dr. Khaled Al-Mirghalani, said Ramadan provided the ideal platform for people to quit smoking since Muslims abstain from this killer habit from dawn to dusk. “It will not be difficult for smokers to continue with the abstention from tobacco during the period from breakfast and sahoor (midnight meal)” he said.
Adding a spiritual note facilitated by the holy month, the official said: “The hand that touches the Holy Qur’an during the month will definitely refuse to touch tobacco.”
He said that people who are interested in kicking up the habit can avail of the facilities and expertise available at the 55 anti-smoking clinics spread across the Kingdom. The clinics will remain open daily from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. during Ramadan, and there are 10 such clinics in Riyadh alone, with one of them exclusively set up for women, he said.
According to a local study, there are an estimated seven million smokers in the Kingdom, including 1.1 million women smokers. The Kingdom’s total consumption of tobacco exceeds 40,000 tons, valued at about SR12 billion ($3.2 billion), says a study by the Khair Anti-Smoking Association, a private company based in Makkah.
The study revealed that school students accounted for nearly 15-27 percent of the total smokers in the Kingdom, which has the 29th highest smoking rate in the world.
Considering the magnitude of the problem, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently renewed its call for more action, warning that tobacco consumption could kill a billion people or more over the course of the 21st century “unless urgent action is taken.”
Lung cancer kills one person every quarter of an hour in the world.
“If the current trend continues, by 2030, tobacco will kill more than eight million people worldwide each year, with 80 percent of these premature deaths among people living in low- and middle-income countries,” the WHO said. It also pointed out that tobacco remains the biggest cause of preventable death worldwide, killing nearly six million people and costing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage each year.
“Countries that introduced complete ban together with other tobacco control measures have been able to cut tobacco use significantly within a few years,” said Dr. Douglas Bettcher, director of WHO’s prevention of non-communicable diseases department.
The WHO report also revealed that three billion people were now covered by national anti-tobacco campaigns. As a result, hundreds of millions of non-smokers are less likely to get into smoking.
The report, however, notes that to achieve the globally-agreed target of a 30 percent reduction in tobacco consumption by 2025, more countries need to implement comprehensive tobacco control programs.
The Kingdom joined the anti-tobacco agreement in May 2005. Saudi Arabia ranks fourth among countries across the world in tobacco imports and consumption. More than 15 billion cigarettes, worth $168 million, go up in smoke every year in Saudi Arabia every year, according to statistics available with the Gulf Cooperation Council.