Join fight against tobacco use, Professor Fastone Matthew Goma prods Zambian media
Notice: Undefined index: catFilterList in /home/zambi/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-likes/api.php on line 243
Join fight against tobacco use, Professor Fastone Matthew Goma prods Zambian media
By Ashton Kelly Bunda and Derrick Sinjela
CENTRE for Primary Care Research (CPCR) Project Director Zambia Professor Fastone Matthew Goma has urged the local media to intensify the fight against tobacco which globally kills more than 8 million people annually and 1.2 million human beings being exposed to second hand smoking.
Professor Goma says his team based at the University of Zambia (UNZA) School of Medicine at the Ridgway Campus on Lusaka’s Nationalist Road, reiterated that CPCR decided to engage Zambian media as key partners helping to administer information in the right doses so that government and other stakeholders are educated, to facilitate prompt and speedy domestication of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
Professor Goma lamented that the monitor policy implementation was first introduced in 2012 and by the year 2016, positive response was expected from government, though zero progress from the Patriotic government is now commonplace.
“It is long overdue, we now want the domestication of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control being expedited, we are beginning to think the issue is dragging, it is too slow from the government side as a key stakeholder, though, my team has decided to engage the media, to help disseminate information to people in right doses,” Professor Goma stressed.
Professor Goma said journalist as a Fourth Estate to the Government (Executive), Legislature and Judiciary are closer to the ordinary people suffering due to consequences of tobacco consumption. Scribes are influential in placing a good battle against a cancerous stick called cigarette.
