University of Basrah Organizes a Symposium on the Harms of Tobacco
The Drug Control Unit in the Scientific Affairs Department at University of Basrah organized a symposium entitled (Tobacco: Its harms and methods of combating it) with the participation of a number of members.
The symposium aimed to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking and addiction to it by young and old people and both sexes and to warn of the health, social and economic harms it causes to them.
The symposium, in which the Director of the Drug Control Unit, Dr. Abbas Jumaa Al-Sudani, lectured, included a historical account of the beginning of the discovery of tobacco and its use within social rituals, customs and traditions and the development of the habit of smoking over the ages, as well as the biological mechanism of the effect of nicotine and its role in the addiction process within the central nervous system that affects the respiratory system and causes heart and artery diseases, brain diseases, muscles, bones and skin diseases, and a statement of the types of foods that help get rid of excessive nicotine concentration in the body, such as garlic, watercress and broccoli.
The symposium discussed Iraqi Law, Number 19 of 2012, which contains 21, specifying the nicotine levels in cigarettes, the places where smoking is prohibited, and the penalties and fines that were enacted against violators at the level of factories, tobacco importers, promoting media institutions, and smokers, with the identification of the most dangerous categories.
Department of Media and Government Communication
