Digital awareness pamphlets to fight tobacco use launched

Sri Ramakrishna Institute of Oncology and Research (SRIOR) here launched digital pamphlets on the ill effects of tobacco as part of observing World No Tobacco Day on Thursday.

S. Lakshmi, Deputy Commissioner of Police (law and order), released the digital pamphlets in the presence of R. Vijayakumhar, managing trustee of SNR and Sons Trust, D. Lakshminarayanaswamy, joint managing trustee, and Karthikesh K., chief surgical oncologist and P. Guhan, director of SRIOR.

As per WHO statistics, tobacco use killed more than 7 million people around the world each year, and that number was predicted to grow unless anti-tobacco actions were increased. It caused many types of cancer, as well as heart disease, stroke, lung disease, and other health problems, said Dr. Guhan. Under the digital pamphlets awareness programme, SRIOR has developed digital awareness contests on tobacco and cancer which can be accessed using QR code scanner in mobile phones.

Scanning of the QR code in the digital pamphlet will guide the user to a website containing awareness contents on the ill effects of tobacco, types of cancer, diagnostic and treatment modalities.

The website has links of SRIOR’s YouTube awareness channel and its Smoking/Tobacco Cessation App for Android and iOS devices. The website also contains awareness materials in Tamil and English that can be downloaded and a page containing more than 1,000 short messages and tips on quitting smoking and other tobacco products. Dr. Guhan said that 86,516 people were screened for oral cancers totally free of cost in the districts of Coimbatore, Tirupur, the Nilgiris, and Erode under SRIOR’s special project ‘Deepam’. Counselling was also given to 46,387 people to quit tobacco.