Gates spearheads anti-smoking push_美文_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Gates spearheads anti-smoking push

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To mark this year's World No Tobacco Day, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched the first-ever anti-smoking social media campaign in China to raise public awareness, particularly of secondhand smoking.

The online campaign, "Say No to Forced Smoking," will enroll more than 1,000 volunteers across the mainland, including some celebrities, to upload their anti-smoking photos to social networking sites such as Sina Weibo.

Official estimates suggest nearly 740 million people suffer from secondhand smoke on the Chinese mainland.

"The campaign aims to make the public become aware of health impacts by forced smoking and their right to say no to it, particularly in public places," said Ray Yip, chief representative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in China.

Public awareness on the mainland remained low in this regard, he said, adding: "It is important to change the social norm among Chinese that smoking is common practice."

Each country and region needs a shift in opinion that smoking in public harms other people's health and therefore is shameful, he said. That change came in the 1970s in the United States and most industrialized countries.

"Laws and regulations already in place in more than 100 Chinese cities should go hand in hand with a changed social norm for effective smoking and tobacco controls," he said.

His remarks were echoed by Wu Yiqun, an anti-tobacco campaigner with the Think Tank Research Center for Health Development, an NGO committed to smoking control in Beijing.