[Report 1992] / Medical Officer of Health, Jersey.

  • Jersey (Channel Islands). Council.
Date:
1992
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1992] / Medical Officer of Health, Jersey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/108 (page 6)
    INTRODUCTION To the President and Members of The Public Health Committee Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen; I have pleasure in submitting my Annual Report for 1992. Smoking and health In 1939 the States of Jersey adopted Regulations to prevent the use of tobacco by children under the age of 16 years in order to protect their physical development. Those Regulations were in effect for only three years. It has taken exactly 50 years and a considerable amount of effort to, in effect, bring those Regulations back into law. The amount of medical and social evidence on the harm of cigarette smoking in young children has increased to enormous proportions since those days and yet, in spite of all the evidence, there was a noteworthy amount of resistance in the States to the re-introduction of the law. The promotion and protection of health is not unfortunately a self evident truth and progress in these matters is frequently determined by compromise to the lowest level of activity. During 1992 the Public Health Committee and the Guernsey Board of Health concluded a voluntary agreement with the Channel Island Tobacco Importers Association in order to curtail the promotion and advertising of tobacco products. Given the opposition to things like the prohibition of sales to children, this agreement was as far as we could reasonably hope to go at the present time. Any further progress on the limitation of advertising of these highly dangerous products will probably be determined by outside agencies such as the European Community. There is a faint ray of hope that past efforts on health promotion are starting to pay dividends as the rate of lung cancer in males increased annually from the 1950’s up to the 1970’s but there are indications of a slight decrease in that trend. Let us hope that this really is the ‘turn of the tide’ for male lung cancer. Women, in terms of smoking, are one or two decades behind the men and the increase in female lung cancer continued until the early 1980’s. The decline in female rates is not as clear cut as for men, and at the present time there is a worrying high rate of smoking amongst women, and of young women taking up smoking. At the present time, lung cancer incidence in proportional terms are worse for women than for men. Mental Health Mental disorders are a major cause of morbidity and, in terms of years of life lost (taking average expectation of life as 75 years) are a considerable cause of mortality. Dementia at 60 years has a prevalence of the order of less than 1%, but the rate doubles approximately every five years so that in the very elderly there are considerable problems of dementia. We need to find the right balance between prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. In order to achieve this balance the division of responsibility between individuals, governments and voluntary agencies must be achieved. The necessary information must be available to all parties so that they may exercise informed choice. Suicide A dividend that might accrue from improving mental health would be a reduction in the tragic loss of life due to suicide, which contributes a considerable proportion of the premature years of life lost.