XN000022-1996-10-24 — Page 3

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In response to members' concerns, the head of the UK delegation, Mr Henry Steel said that the UK Government would continue to press the Chinese Government at all levels to accede to the covenant and its any case to agree a mechanism for reporting after the handover.

The Committee is expected to release their concluding observations in a

fortnight.

End

Join hands to promote a "smokefree" culture, SHW urges

**

The rising trend of smoking among young men and women in Hong Kong is worrying, the Secretary for Health and Welfare, Mrs Katherine Fok, said today (Thursday).

She said while the smoking rate for people aged 15 and above had dropped from 23.3 per cent in 1982 to 14.8 per cent today, this was not the case for the other

age groups.

For boys aged 15 to 19, the smoking rate has hardly declined from 7.5 per cent in 1982 to 5.5 per cent in 1988, and has risen to 5.9 per cent today. For girls of the same age group, the rising trend is even more obvious with their smoking rate rising from only 0.4 per cent in 1982 to 1.3 per cent in 1988, then dropping to 0.9 per cent in 1993, and again rising to stand at 1.3 per cent.

"Although the percentage of teenage smokers in the overall population is low, the trend is nonetheless worrying," Mrs Fok said, warning that once young smokers were hooked on nicotine, few were able to quit.

Mrs Fok was speaking at the opening of the 1996 Conference on Smoking and Health organised by the Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health.

She told the conference, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, that the Government took the problem of smoking, especially among young people very seriously.

In 1982, the Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance was enacted to provide a regulatory framework to restrict the sale and promotion of tobacco products and set up statutory no-smoking areas to protect the public from passive smoking.