With no let-up in cancer cases due to tobacco consumption across the country, the Union Health Ministry is mulling to rope in around nine lakh ASHA workers to create awareness about the menace in the 6,00,000 odd villages.
“Despite our mega ad-blitz launched time to time, we have not been able to curb the menace at least in the villages where the problem of tobacco consumption is deep-rooted,” said a senior health official from the anti-tobacco Control Department of the Union Health Ministry.
In India, four out of every 10 new cancer cases are tobacco-related and claim around 2,000 lives every day. India is the second largest consumer of tobacco products in the world with 35 per cent of adults (15 years and above) consuming tobacco.
“So we have now decided to take help from ASHA (acronym for Accredited Social Health Workers) to spread message on tobacco control. We will soon prepare a tobacco control module for them,” the official said.
This will be the added responsibility on the ASHA workers who are already playing a significant role in disseminating information on various social issues like child marriage and girl child killing among many others.
ASHAs, which were introduced through National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) launched in 2005, are given incentives for their various tasks, including taking women for institutional deliveries, organising nutrition camps, vaccinating children, giving tuberculosis medicines and motivating people for family planning.
However, the move to rope in the ASHA workers has come quite late though. Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Jagdish Kaur said that apart from roping in ASHA workers, counselling TB patients about the harmful impact of consuming tobacco can go a long way in helping them quit the cancerous product and subsequently cut down the risk from the deadly disease.
In her study published in the recent WHO South East Asia Journal of Public Health, lead author Kaur also found that at the end of treatment, of the 67.3 per cent patients who were offered ‘brief advice’ readily quit tobacco use.