Stamps issued to promote anti-smoking efforts

The stamps, designed by painter Pham Trung Ha of the Vietnam Post Corporation, feature two contrary images, a healthy lung of a non-smoker and a black lung of smokers and passive smokers.

The message on the stamps read “Do not smoke for the health of you and your beloved ones.”

Addressing the event, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Minh Hong underlined the health effects of cigarettes and smoking, citing data of the World Health Organisation that there are about 7 million deaths from smoking-related diseases, including about 900,000 deaths resulted by passive smoking, in the world each year.

Vietnam is among the 15 countries with the world’s highest smoking prevalence among male adults when one in every two male adults is a smoker.

Around 40,000 people die of smoking-related diseases in the country every year, and many of the diseases like cancers, cardiovascular diseases and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are leading death causes in Vietnam, he noted.

Hong said the stamps will be a multidimensional message helping with the implementation of the national strategy on anti-tobacco harms until 2020 and the law on prevention and control of tobacco harms.