Over the past week, the Ministry of Health and Wellness has engaged in a series of workshops to promote a smoke-free and emission-free Latin America. With assistance from PAHO, the workshop brought together key stakeholders to discuss stricter tobacco policies, ahead of the new tobacco bill. Today was the final day of the workshop, and we learned more about it.
Rosa Carolina Sandoval, Regional Advisor on Tobacco Control, PAHO
"The countries of Latin America have made significant progress in implementing cost effective measures on tobacco control like smoke free environments. We are lucky that at this moment that 15 Latin American countries have already implemented smoke free laws, meaning that smoking is banned in public places and indoor places. This is great. We are here in Belize because Belize is one of four countries that have not implemented that measure yet."
"What we know is that Belize is having a similar experience to other countries in Latin America, which is when you look at the numbers of how many adult people smoke, you see that the numbers are not that high and that men smoke much more than women. But when you look at the numbers among kids between 14 years old and 15 years old, then you see that boys and girls are smoking about the same amount. That is concerning because that's a window to the future because it seems that adult women are smoking less but girls are smoking as much as boys."
Esner Vellos, Dir., National Drug Abuse Control Council, MOHW
"We've also met with a number of Ministry of Health staff so that we can also sensitize them about this initiative. On Tuesday, we also met with a number of stakeholders so that we would be able to provide them with the information so that they are aware about what the initiative is all about and at the same time garner some support in terms of ensuring that when we pass the National Tobacco Bill, the stakeholders involved will be able to understand not only the bill but the role they play in ensuring that the bill is effectively implemented. We also did a number of courtesy visits to a number of ministries at the same time to ensure that they are aware of what this initiative is all about."
"I believe at this time we are at a golden opportunity to ensure that we not only garner the support for the legislation but also in terms of garnering the support for the protection of our young population in terms of reducing consumption of tobacco control but at the same time creating safe spaces for our community in general."
Jessica Vele, Public Health Team, Bloomberg Philanthropies
"From the public health side, we primarily focus on addressing non-communicable diseases in low and middle income countries. For that very reason is one of the reasons why we've been working with the Bloomberg initiative to reduce tobacco use since 2007 because tobacco use and exposure is one of the main risk factors for some of the top ten causes of death so it's one of the reasons we're very invested in addressing tobacco use and advancing tobacco policies around the world."
