A Filipino dies of a smoking-related illness every six minutes. The Department of Health considers passing the bill could help solve the problem. Health Secretary Francisco Duque III also warned that more efforts were needed to combat smoking which is estimated to kill a billion people this century. Duque said: “The DoH hopes that the bill would be passed against all odds. We fully support the bill in its entirety.” The WHO also informed that 80 percent of the one billion people are considered to die because of smoking in developing countries. It noted that the Philippines is the country with “the greatest number of smokers, the highest rates of male smoking prevalence, and the fastest increase of tobacco uptake by women and young people.”

Duque said that the country spends more than P280 billion every year to cure people with smoking-related diseases. Dr Shigeru Omi, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific, said: “Tobacco use disproportionately hurts the poor and deepens poverty by siphoning off money needed for basic necessities such as food, shelter, and education and killing wage earners in the prime of their lives.”

According to 2003 WHO figures, the Philippines ranked fifth in the world with the highest number of adult male smokers and 26th among countries with the biggest number of female adult smokers. The country also ranked second and fourth among countries with the highest number of girls and boys who smoke.

The convention has been signed by 160 countries and calls for, among other measures, appropriate labeling and packaging of tobacco products. Duque said scientists have shown that a graphic health warning on cigarette packs “is one of the best measures to prevent people from nicotine addiction.”

One of the few countries which implement graphic health warnings is Singapore, where bloody images of people suffering from smoking-related illnesses are shown on the packages. Health Undersecretary Alexander Padilla also said the country has endorsed international covenants on rights of children and women, whose rights are affected “through second-hand smoke, targeted marketing, child labor, green tobacco sickness, and diverting family income needed for food and education to satisfy an addiction for nicotine.”

In a study Norwegian doctors reported that women who smoke have heart attacks more than a dozen years earlier than women who don’t smoke. But for men, the gap is not so dramatic, because male smokers have heart attacks about six years earlier than men who don’t smoke.

Dr. Silvia Priori, a cardiologist at the Scientific Institute in Pavia, Italy, said: “Women need to realize they are losing much more than men when they smoke,” she said. Priori was not connected to the research.

Dr. Morten Grundtvig and colleagues from the Innlandet Hospital Trust in Lillehammer, Norway, based their study on data from 1,784 patients admitted for a first heart attack at a hospital in Lillehammer.

Their study found that the men on average had their first heart attack at age 72 if they didn’t smoke, and at 64 if they did. But women in the study had their first heart attack at age 81 if they didn’t smoke, and at age 66 if they did.

That works out to eight and 15 years, respectively, for men and women. After adjusting for other heart risk factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes, researchers found that the difference for men was about six years for women about 14 years.

Previous studies looking at a possible gender difference have been unconvinced,
because doctors have long suspected that female hormones protect women against heart disease. Estrogen is thought to raise the levels of good cholesterol as well as enabling blood vessel walls to relax more easily, thus lowering the chances of a blockage.

Grundtvig said that smoking might make women go through menopause earlier, leaving them less protected against a heart attack.

“Smoking might erase the natural advantage that women have,” added Dr. Robert Harrington, a professor of medicine at Duke University and spokesman for the American College of Cardiology.

Doctors aren’t yet sure if other cardiac risk factors like cholesterol and obesity also affect women.