Rural areas previously uncounted show heavy toll
Editor
Mar 30, 2012
The first nationwide study of cancer in India shows the clear link between the nation’s urgent tobacco problem and cancer rates. The study published in The Lancet is the first to document the burden of tobacco use in India’s rural areas, where 70 percent of Indians live.
Continue reading First India Cancer Study Shows Clear Link to Tobacco
Loophole keeps kids working in tobacco industry and out of school
Editor
Mar 20, 2012
Sagira Ansari suffers from coughs, colds, fever and persistent headaches. But her ailments do not shorten her workday or slow her as she drops flakes of tobacco into square-cut leaves, rolls them deftly and ties the ends of a bidi cigarette with twists of red thread.
"I can't play around," she laments in a story by the Associated Press.
At age 11, Sagira, is surrounded by dust as she works eight-hour shifts producing bidis, a popular form of tobacco smoked mostly by men in India — but made by women and children.
Continue reading Children Toil in Poverty to Produce India’s Bidi Cigarettes
Lax enforcement of ban on sales to kids drives epidemic among young people
Editor
Dec 1, 2011
BBC World's innovative series The Health Show will broadcast a report this weekend examining India's daunting problem of tobacco use among children and its shocking consequences for health.
Young people in India commonly use gutka, a carcinogenic cocktail of flavored smokeless tobacco and additives. Extremely cheap and easily purchased by children and teenagers, an estimated 5 million kids are addicted to the product. It's responsible for 90 percent of oral cancer cases in India.
Continue reading BBC World Investigates Why India is the Oral Cancer Capital of the World
India’s smokeless tobacco epidemic claims actor whose character fought “gutka king”
Editor
Sep 16, 2011
Tobacco does not spare even Superman.
Shafique Sheikh, a 25-year old Indian actor, became a local celebrity playing Superman in a spoof of the popular superhero movies. In Sheikh's version of the film, Superman battled an evil "gutka king" who wants to flood the town with cheap, addictive chewing tobacco.
In real life, the former textile worker had begun using the local form of smokeless tobacco — gutka — at age eight, consuming as many as 40 packets daily until he was diagnosed with a pre-cancerous condition in his jaw when he was 18.
Continue reading Even Superman Succumbs to Tobacco
People hooked on gutka want authorities to take fast action
Rajika Jayatilake, Associate Director, International Communications
Aug 15, 2011
Hundreds of thousands of victims of smokeless tobacco are raising their voices against a regional product — gutka — that is responsible for 90 percent of oral cancer cases in India, the nation with the highest rate of oral cancer in the world.
State by state, tobacco users who became addicted at young ages and suffer from devastating illnesses are trying to shock their state chief executives into action by telling their personal stories. So far, the chief ministers in 11 out of 28 states already have signed a pledge to "rid India of this menace tobacco."
Continue reading Smokeless Tobacco Users in India Cry “Enough!”
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