Gates and NY mayor in $500m smoking campaign

US: NEW YORK mayor Michael Bloomberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said they will together provide $500 million to fight tobacco use around the world, especially in developing countries where smoking rates are rising.

Mr Bloomberg has already given $125 million to the cause and will provide $250 million more. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it will spend $125 million over five years, including a $24 million grant to the Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, which Mr Bloomberg created in 2005.

"We said, 'Let's design our work to be complementary'," Mr Gates told the audience at an event on Wednesday that included interviews with both men by PBS television journalist Charlie Rose.

Mr Bloomberg has made limiting public smoking and easy access to smoking-cessation services high priorities since becoming New York's mayor.

He said that during his administration, the city's rate of smoking has fallen 22 per cent, and smoking by teenagers more than 50 per cent.

In 2005 his foundation helped pay for a survey of smoking prevalence, as well as tobacco control measures and smoking-cessation programmes in 179 countries.

The report was published in February as part of a global anti-smoking campaign called MPOWER. The letters stand for: Monitoring tobacco use; Protecting people by enforcing smoke-free laws; Offering smokers treatment; Warning of tobacco's hazards; Enforcing advertising bans; and Raising taxes on tobacco.

India and China are places where tobacco control is especially needed, the philanthropists said.

Mr Gates said that in China, 67 per cent of men and more than half of doctors smoke.

He said he hopes anti-smoking efforts will prevent Africa - where about 20 per cent of men smoke - from suffering the high rates that European and American countries once did and many Asian countries now do.

- (LA Times-Washington Post service)

© 2008 The Irish Times

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