Public Health Thought Leadership Dialogue: Creating a Smokefree Future
Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2022
Time: 3:30 to 5:00pm (SGT)
Venue:
National University of Singapore, Lecture Theatre 37 (MD1), Level 3, Tahir Foundation Building, 12 Science Drive, S117549
Synopsis:
NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health presents the Public Health Thought Leadership Dialogue: Creating a Smokefree Future
The Keynote address on New Zealand’s Smokefree 2025 Action Plan will be delivered by The Honourable Dr Ayesha Verrall, Minister for COVID-19; Research, Science and Innovation; Seniors and Associate Minister for Health, New Zealand.
About the speaker:
The Honourable Dr Ayesha Verrall
Dr Ayesha Verrall is a Cabinet Minister in the New Zealand Government. She holds the portfolios of Minister for Covid-19 Response, Minister of Research, Science and Innovation, Minister for Seniors, and Associate Minister of Health.
Prior to entering parliament in 2020, Dr Verrall was an infectious diseases physician at Wellington Hospital and epidemiologist at the University of Otago. She served on national technical advisory groups relating to tuberculosis control and immunisation. Dr Verrall’s rapid audit of contact tracing was influential in the development of New Zealand’s Covid-19 response.
Dr Verrall’s focus in government has been on the Covid-19 response, science system reform and the strengthening of public health including:
• Developing New Zealand’s Smokefree 2025 Action Plan
• Promoting the fluoridation of drinking water
• Mandating folate fortification of non-organic bread making flour
• Investing in enhanced screening for breast and cervical cancer
• Investing in rheumatic fever vaccine development
Ayesha grew up in beautiful Te Anau on the edge of Fiordland National Park. She attended medical school at the University of Otago and worked as a junior doctor at Wellington hospital. Ayesha completed her specialist training at National University Hospital Singapore and her doctoral studies on tuberculosis in Indonesia.
Moderator:
Dr Hsien-Hsien Lei
Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Singapore — the largest and the most active international business association in Singapore and Southeast Asia representing nearly 600 companies. Hsien is also Adjunct Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, member of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Advisory Board, Vice President of the Precision Public Health Asia Society and board member of TalenTtrust.
Prior to AmCham, Hsien was Vice President, Medical and Scientific Affairs, Medtronic Asia Pacific, where she was responsible for the Medtronic Innovation Centers in Japan and Korea, training and education, and the company’s health systems transformation strategy in the region. Hsien has extensive experience in scientific affairs, corporate and healthcare communications, advertising, public relations and government affairs.
Hsien has lived and worked in the US, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, UK, and is now based in Singapore. She holds a BA (with honors) in Human Biology from Stanford University and a PhD in Epidemiology from The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health where she was the recipient of a US National Institutes of Health Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology Training Grant. Her doctoral thesis explored the genetic epidemiology of end-stage renal disease and type 2 diabetes. She completed her post-doctoral fellowship at National Taiwan University Hospital in the Department of Internal Medicine.
Panellists:
Dr Yvette van der Eijk
Dr Yvette van der Eijk is an Assistant Professor at the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. She leads research to support tobacco policies in Singapore. She also works on global tobacco control, commercial determinants of health, and mental health. She has an interdisciplinary background in tobacco control.
Prior to joining the School, she completed a PhD in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS) on the ethics of tobacco control, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Centre of Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. She also completed Visiting Research Fellowships at the Brocher Foundation (Switzerland), University of Tübingen (Germany), and Hastings Center (New York), and worked as a Consultant for the Tobacco Control Programme at the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe (Denmark). She has published on a wide range of tobacco policy issues including the tobacco endgame, industry tactics, youth smoking, addiction, secondhand smoke, ethics, etc, both for the Singapore and international contexts, using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods including archival and tobacco industry documents research.
Dr Koong Heng Nung
Dr Koong is a practicing lung surgeon over the last 2 decades after his Thoracic Surgery Fellowship at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, New York. Being an excellent public communicator, he launched the Lung Cancer Awareness Month Programme at the National Cancer Centre Singapore in 2003 and in 2004, he successfully mobilised massive public support for smoke-free pubs in Singapore that resulted in a legislation 2 years later.
In 2008, he initiated research on Tobacco-Free Generation (TFG) that led to his 2010 seminal TFG publication in Tobacco Control journal. The proposal was recognised formally as an Endgame approach at the 2012 World Conference on Tobacco Or Health in Singapore where his debut presentation then, and subsequent, presentations at the next two consecutive World Conferences, activated a few key international tobacco control experts. In turn, these visionary leaders contributed to further TFG progress in Tasmania, Brookline USA, New Zealand, Denmark and Malaysia.
The Tobacco-Free Generation International Limited non-profit organisation was founded in 2014 to spearhead this global social movement. This led to more unsolicited professional endorsements, international traction and several consecutive, end-of-conference written resolutions from 2013 to 2018. In 2016, with the support of the former Director General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Margaret Chan and then Mayor Joet Garcia, he was invited to teach and train TFG advocates in the city of Balanga, Philippines. Within 2 years, there was a community-wide, TFG social movement where 32,000 residents signed a petition calling for a TFG law. With such preliminary public and social media support, there has never been any public protests or push-back. This led to the world’s first TFG legislation in 2017. Internet search “Tobacco Free Generation Balanga City, Dinalupihan and TFG Filipinas” to see past and present TFG progress.
While there are many more important elements to this TFG social movement, here are three key TFGiEndgame pointers for this event:
- Ground-up social movement and working with youths are vital to rapidly change social norms. Activating youths bring extensive social media reach which in turn garner buy-in unlike conventional tobacco/vaping prohibitive approaches that receive push-backs. Besides being spontaneous, self-driven, scalable and sustainable, youth involvement is energetic and often free! Additionally, the mobilisation of such massive support from the future generation results in no more new demand in which the industry will naturally withers. Thus, engaging the future generation is both our best defence and offence.
- As understanding the blindspots in current tobacco control measures are vital, we urge interested end-gamers to learn how TFG is better than the universally accepted but fundamentally flawed, Minimum Legal Age to smoke legislation. A series of TikTok TFG videos featuring Dr Koong, is available on the internet under “Mr Tok Show”. These videos recently garnered more than 600,000 views. The TFG website www.tobaccofregen.com has a 15 minute introductory video titled “Overcoming Global Blind Spots” and a lot more resources that are freely available. Eloquent public discourse by every individual in the entire society is needed to precisely describe TFG. Equally important, learn how to defend TFG robustly against the continual agnotology from the tobacco industry. Therefore, TFG does not leave our political leaders to push for better public health policies alone as they become the target of the industry.
- Another key element of the TFGiEndgame discourse is the elimination of the ever widening chasm of antagonism/hate speech between smokers and non-smokers that has stemmed from policies that inadvertently alienate smokers. Smokers are largely victims who became addicted as they did not know better. This TFG birthdate based approach, does not penalise older, addicted smokers born before the pre-defined birthdate. Therefore, these smokers and non-smokers unite to support TFG. And this is also exactly how laws are often made, a process known as “grandfathering”.
Thus the TFGiEndgame education ecosystem, as designed by Dr Koong and promoted with our better educated, volunteering leaders, is resulting in the social, structural and political improvements that define Tobacco Endgame. He is often asked to show evidence of the TFG impact: it is these increasing global traction and adoptions of TFG by individuals, schools, communities, cities and countries that are the surrogate measures of impact. These have arisen from the many TFG education workshops over the last 12 years in Singapore, various ASEAN countries and even South Africa. These sessions consistently transform the mindset of attendees from across all sectors of society irrespective of their background, nationalities and culture.
Dr Koong dedicates these progress to his patients’ whose lives were lost to smoking addictions. More lives will continue to be lost to the tobacco pandemic if we continue with more of the same without TFGiEndgame. Benjamin Lozare, a retired professor from the Institute of Global Tobacco Control, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in 2016 described Dr Koong’s work in this TFGiEndgame as “liberating, game-changing and beyond imagination”.
Achieving immediate ZERO incidence of smokers and vapers in the new generation is now possible!
Dr Derrick Heng
Dr Derrick Heng is Deputy to the Director of Medical Services at the Ministry of Health in Singapore. He covers Public Health, with responsibility for oversight of Communicable Diseases, Non-Communicable Diseases and International Cooperation / Global Health issues. His areas of work include public health policy and surveillance for communicable and non-communicable diseases; public health aspects of pandemic preparedness and response; population health analytics; and international co-operation. In the area of tobacco control, Derrick has been involved in policy initiatives such as prohibitions on emerging tobacco products, raising the minimum legal age, point-of-sale display bans, and standardised packaging.
Derrick is an adjunct Professor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, and works with the School to facilitate the policy-relevance and translation of the work done at the School.
Coming from a background in clinical internal medicine, Derrick began working in the field of epidemiology in 1997, after obtaining a Masters at Cambridge University. Before taking on a policy role, he was involved in epidemiological research in the areas of clinical epidemiology, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer, in addition to interests in research design and methodology, critical appraisal, and the ethical review of clinical trials.