Anti-smoking crusade of the Minister of Health - The Time

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Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin launches a new anti-smoking crusade and raises the social alarm in a letter sent to senators and deputies. “I ask your support, both inside and outside Parliament” in the fight for the prevention and anti-smoking “to make a small step forward for civilization, to help us achieve one of the objectives that are dearest to me, as a woman and as a minister : prevention. Because the prevention, before being an analysis or a CAT scan, is within us, in our behavior, our way of life, “writes the minister in his appeal. “There is a cultural and social alarm, even before health care, on which you need to think together-add – I was struck, as a woman and then as minister, the brutally statistics that tell us how our kids are beginning to turn a cigarette now already 12 years old. Adolescents who apparently have not been positively influenced by pressing anti-smoking campaigns that have found a plac e in the industrialized West in recent decades, while many of their parents have proudly announced that he had “quit smoking”, winning their personal battle against an addiction dangerous. The smoke is proven, it is the leading cause of death in Europe, where it reaps 750,000 lives a year. In Italy there are 80,000 a year, as if a large city like Varese Grosseto or be swallowed in a cloud of smoke. “

“The paradox – continues Lorenzin – is that big have quit smoking and our children instead begin to 12 years. There is something wrong with it. Which requires us to react. I made a rule to ban smoking even in open spaces of schools, where they gathered professors, students, school employees, to extend a ban that should be lived as a lifesaver. What would you think if going to a doctor, that you smoked in the face or allow smoking in his office? Nothing is more contradictory, nothing more negative. But equalize schools to what happens some time in public office, in restaurants, airports, plane, train, may suffice to have a clear conscience? The proposal that I brought to the Council of Ministers to ban smoking in cars in front of children and pregnant women – says Lorenzin – has been criticized by some as an attack on personal freedom, an interference of the “ethical state” who wants to enter in your house to give y ou orders. Intoxicate a child into the narrow cockpit of your car is not evidence of liberalism nor an affirmation of freedom. ” It is first of all – he adds – “a very bad example, an ode to a style of life that teaches us not to take care of their own health and that of those around us, urging negative herd behavior, which makes the end even dramatically ridiculous all those dispense advice that moms and dads to their children, (“too much chocolate is bad, you are a stomach ache, the fried is heavy, if you get cold you are cold and a fever”) when compared to the silence in front of the smoke kills. ” For the minister, “the crisis of the West is not just economic. It is also a crisis of values. We are forgetting our achievements, respect for others, the most basic principles of civic education. But if we laugh at the word to our children, if you hear them say in the car “daddy do not pass through a red light”, ̶ 0;dad do not say bad words”, “dad smoke makes me sick,” then perhaps we will be served with something. “

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