LAHORE: Every year, World No Tobacco Day is celebrated worldwide on May 31. This year the theme was Heart Disease & Tobacco and Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Centre organised a poster competition to highlight the adverse effects of tobacco consumption. Tobacco kills more than 7 million people every year around the world where 12 percent of death above 30 years of age are due to smoking and up to 10 billion cigarettes are disposed of in the environment every day. Shaukat Khanum received thousands of posters from a number of students belonging to different schools from across the country. Selected ones were displayed in the corridors of the hospital. After the display, a prize distribution ceremony was held where Shaukat Khanum Hospital consultant oncologist Dr Neelam Siddique was the chief guest. While talking to students and their parents, Dr Neelam Siddique said that “Smoking is injurious for health and causes many types of diseases including different types of cancer. The only solution to avoid these diseases is to avoid smoking.” Shaukat Khanum Hospital is running a comprehensive media campaign to highlight the adverse effects of smoking. Parents and students praised the efforts of the hospital in this regard. It is pertinent to say that Shaukat Khanum is running a holistic anti-tobacco drive across the country. In this drive, lectures are delivered in numbers of schools, colleges and universities by senior doctors. It is general practice across the globe to aware the youth about the adverse effects of smoking and this is one reason of decreasing the ratio of tobacco consumption in developed countries. In Pakistan, Shaukat Khanum also runs an anti-tobacco campaign among educational institutes across Pakistan and making the youth more aware about the effects of smoking by lectures from experienced doctors. According to the hospital, statistics show that nearly 40 percent cancers in adult males at the hospital can be linked with the use of tobacco. It is the single most preventable cause of death, poverty and illness worldwide. Tobacco kills nearly six million people a year worldwide and will kill up to 1 billion people in this century. Approximately, one person dies every six seconds due to tobacco. More than 600,000 of those that die globally each year are non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s more than one billion smokers live in low- and middle-income countries like Pakistan. In Pakistan, nearly 33 percent of males and 6 percent of females smoke. Tobacco smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals. At least 250 of them are known to be harmful and over 50 can cause cancer. A high incidence of lung cancer is associated with smoking tobacco. Tobacco can also cause cancer in other parts of the body such as the bladder, kidneys, uterus, cervix, breast, pancreas, colon and various types of lip and oral cavity cancers. In Pakistan, tobacco is consumed not only through cigarettes, cigars and hookah, but also in smokeless forms such as paan/betel with tobacco, chalia/supari, naswar and gutka. Oral cancer is the second most common form of cancer seen in Pakistan and the use of smokeless tobacco is known to increase the risk of oral cancer. Tobacco can also lead to heart disease, increasing the chance of a heart attack or stroke, as well as causing major lung diseases, which can lead to severe breathing difficulties. It is the need of the time to join hands with Shaukat Khanum in its mission to save our future by making Pakistan a smoke free country through its annual anti-tobacco awareness campaign and thus reducing the ratio of cancer cases caused by smoking. Published in Daily Times, June 1st 2018.