Project description
Introduction
Tobacco consumption remains very high in NIS countries and its decrease could save millions of human lives during next decades. International experience clearly shows that effective tobacco control legislation and media campaigns are key tobacco control tools. However in NIS countries such international experience is often neglected, mainly due to the lack of access to updated information on most of tobacco control issues. Each of NIS countries has its own experience of tobacco control, which is mainly unknown in neighboring countries, while it can be even more useful for them as it is much more relevant to realities of these countries.
Tobacco control resource center is to be established to provide comprehensive tobacco control information in Russian to public health advocates from governmental structures and NGOs in all NIS countries.
Main Activities
1/ Monitoring of tobacco control information (legislation, actions, events, research, surveys, etc.) from NIS countries;
2/ Monitoring and translation into Russian of most relevant tobacco control information from international sources;
3/ Monitoring of Russian language media in NIS countries (mainly Internet sources);
4/ Issuing and sending to special mailing list the following electronic newsletters:
a) Tobacco Control News in Russian - information on recent development of tobacco control legislation, on events, press-releases, new materials on web-sites, media articles and other important tobacco control issues in NIS countries (monthly). In three months after project start it will evaluated and this newsletter could be issued more often if relevant materials will be available;
b) Tobacco Control Issues - short information in Russian on each of key tobacco control issues (advertising, taxes, ETS, etc) with links to information sources both in Russian and in English (monthly);
c) Tobacco Control News from NIS countries in English - most interesting tobacco control information from NIS countries to keep international tobacco control community informed (twice a year).
5/ Preparing fact sheets, toolkits, media kits, guides, databases on tobacco control issues;
6/ Presenting the above mentioned information on designated web-site with links to other relevant web-sites. Where people have problems accessing the Internet, documents can be sent to them over email;
7/ Providing expertise on request for tobacco control advocates from NIS countries and contacts with Russian-speaking experts and if needed key international tobacco control experts;
8/ Training of the network members on information issues during network meetings in March, April (financed from other projects) and the World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Helsinki (August, 2003).
ADIC-Ukraine has experience on most of the above-mentioned activities:
1) Since 2000 it develops special tobacco control web site in Russian http://www.adic.org.ua/nosmoking
2) Since February 2000 special electronic newsletter NOSMOKING is issued on monthly basis. At present 970 persons are subscribed to this newsletter anonymously and 647 by ADIC-Ukraine mailing list. In this list we have persons from following countries: Ukraine 473; Russia 107; Latvia10; Lithuania 5; Estonia 6; Belarus 4; EU 6; Bulgaria 3, USA 3; Georgia 5; Armenia 2; Azerbaijan 4; Moldova 3, Kazakhstan 4; Kyrgyzstan 3; Uzbekistan 2, Israel 1; Tajikistan 1.
3) ADIC-Ukraine experts have issued several tobacco control booklets (on tobacco control legislation, on light cigarettes, on smoking cessation, etc.);
4) ADIC-Ukraine experts have experience of translating into Russian tobacco control documents (for example «Curbing the Epidemic» by the World Bank);
5) ADIC-Ukraine experts provided information and assistance to tobacco control advocates from other NIS countries (for example to Moldova on tobacco industry «youth prevention» programs);
6) ADIC-Ukraine has experience of tobacco control research (such as on economics of tobacco in Ukraine) and surveys (such as Global Youth Tobacco Survey).
