Preventing Major Non-Communicable Diseases

International World Health Day... I was one of the judges for a poster making competition at a management institute in Ghaziabad.

There was overwhelming response from the students. There were over 90 students who had participated in the poster making competition. Some of the posters were very well designed. There were innovative ideas too.

Many of the students had listed out 10-20 harmful substances found in cigarette smoke. There were some posters that depicted the many ways in which tobacco acts on the different systems of the body. I was really impressed with the amount of homework the undergraduate students had done. Awareness is probably the first step towards abstinence from smoking.

After the competitions, there was a 2 hr lecture session on health awareness. Dr Agarwal introduced the term 'non-communicable diseases' and discussed the signs and symptoms of common non-communicable diseases (heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc). I spoke on the preventing measures common to these three  diseases...tobacco control, eating right and exercising.

Tobacco Awareness Workshop

Last afternoon, I was speaking to a group of students at ABES Engineering College, Ghaziabad on the topic "Tobacco & Your Health: Make an Informed Choice". It was a new experience for me to talk about tobacco and that too to a group of youngsters who had 'heard too much about tobacco' and did not want to receive any new gyaan. Our preworkshop assessment showed that though 93% of the students answered over 50% of the questions about tobacco correctly, they actually needed to know a lot more. Of the 214 respondents, only 8 had answered all the questions correctly. That's less than 4%.

My book titled "Things You Always Wanted to Know About Tobacco" is almost done. It's a book targeted at school goers. Hope it clicks well with them. There's already lots of information about tobacco all around. I am just trying to collate these together.