Vietnam’s smoking rate down

Vietnam’s smoking rate fell from 23.8 percent in 2010 to 22.5 percent last year, according to a Xinhua Newswire citing the Ministry of Health (MoH).

These figures were given at a seminar on the results of the Global Adult Tobacco Survey hosted by the MoH in Hanoi on Tuesday.

Among the figures presented were those showing how the rate of smoking among men went down from 47.4 percent to 45.3 percent during the same period.

And in urban areas, the rate of smoking among men fell from 47.7 percent in 2010 to 42.7 percent in 2015.

Despite these decreases, Vietnam’s 45.3 percent incidence of smoking among men puts it among the countries with the highest rates of tobacco use, the MoH said.

The story said that in Vietnam tobacco was sold ‘everywhere’; so people found it easy to access tobacco.

In the future, in order to reduce the smoking rate and further implement the Law on Prevention and Control of Tobacco Harms which took effect three years ago, Vietnam would speed up efforts to prohibit smoking in public areas and propose tobacco tax increases, reported the state-run news agency VNA.