A senior health official has expressed concern at what she says is the growing number of students in Jamaica who are using electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), and appealed to children to avoid the product.

“Vaping is rapidly growing in schools, not just high schools but primary schools just like yours, and it is so popular among young people because there is a perception that it is harmless,” Dr Tamu Davidson, director of the Non-Communicable Disease and Injury Prevention and Control Unit at the Ministry of Health and Wellness, told students attending a World No Tobacco Day Youth Forum and Exhibit last Friday.

The forum, held at Pembroke Hall Primary School in St Andrew, aimed to increase awareness among primary and high school children about the negative effects of tobacco-based products.

Davidson said she is concerned about the marketing strategies used by the tobacco industry to entice children to engage in vaping.

“We are concerned that the tobacco industry strategically targets youth to replace customers who quit or die, so half of the people who smoke tobacco will die from it and it harms every part of the body,” she said.

“The strategies include releasing new products with child-friendly flavours like the bubble gum and all of these things; marketing and selling these products near schools; displaying them at children’s eye levels near snacks and sweets, sugary drinks; marketing these on social media and all over these platforms; and also sponsoring youth programmes like sporting events and concerts as well as school programmes,” she said.

However, she said that the Tobacco Control Act will mitigate the impact of these strategies and protect more children from starting to smoke.

Jamaica Coalition for Tobacco Control representative, Nurse Denese Dacres-Reeves announced that, globally, at least 37 million youth between the ages of 13 and 15 years use some form of tobacco, while more than eight million per year die from complications stemming from tobacco use.

“The Jamaica Health and Lifestyle survey of 2016/2017 shows the current adult prevalence of smoking to be 15 per cent in males and five per cent in females. The data for the 2017 Global Youth Tobacco Survey suggested that e-cigarettes have become popular among young people, with 11.7 per cent being students,” Dacres-Reeves said.

She also expressed concern about the easy accessibility of e-cigarettes in Jamaica and urged students to resist the temptation to purchase them.

State minister in the Ministry of Education Marsha Smith, in her keynote speech, compared the negative effects of tobacco use to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The very same dangers that we face from COVID are the very same dangers that we face from tobacco. The only difference I would say is that we can see the immediate effects of COVID, within three to seven days of infection, but the tobacco is a lot more dangerous because it is a secret enemy that lurks in the body for years,” Smith told the students.

She urged them to use the pandemic as an example to understand how badly tobacco use can destroy not only their lives but the lives of family members and relatives.

“Every time you see a tobacco product, whether it is a traditional tobacco product or an e-cigarette, I want you to remember what COVID did to the world and say to yourself, ‘If COVID did so much to the world and destroyed so many lives, it’s the same thing that tobacco is doing right now in this moment,’ ” she said.