| |
|
|
|
Carthage Middle School students see results of smoking
Carthage Press
11/19/2009
CARTHAGE, Mo. -
For Chalaine Bell, it was working as a young nurse and seeing a woman in her 30s die of lung disease and leave behind three children with no mother or father.
For T.J. Teed, it is watching his aunt, who was a non-smoker, but worked in restaurants in Carthage that allowed smoking, struggle with emphysema.
Bell and Teed now share the same passion to try to convince as many people as possible that smoking and second-hand smoke are to be avoided at all costs.
On Wednesday, Bell, director of cardio pulmonary services at McCune-Brooks Regional Hospital, and Teed, director of the new group Smoke-Free Carthage, were speaking to fifth graders at Carthage Middle School about what happens to a person’s lungs when they smoke for an extended period of time.
Their message got through to fifth graders Rylee Parrish and Jayme Moss, especially after Bell brought out two sets of actual lungs from pigs, one set that was healthy and the other that had been exposed to years of cigarette smoke.
“It was gross, the black one,” Parrish said. “Because it shows how bad your lungs can get after you smoke.”
“My stomach started hurting and my head started hurting when I saw that,” Moss added.
Bell said she targets fifth graders because they are just entering an age when more opportunities to smoke are available to them, even though it is illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone under 18 years of age.
She said 8 percent of all smokers are children in junior high.
“It’s a passion for me, of course I’m a respiratory therapist and I promote that, but I’m not going to say I haven’t ever smoked,” Bell said. “Just watching all my patients and what they have to go through and their family members I just made a conscious decision that I didn’t want to go through that. I wanted to be around to raise my kids and I’m into sports and all that and I could tell a difference.”
New group
Teed said his group, Smoke-Free Carthage, received a $75,000 grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health in September to start pushing for a smoking ban in all public places in Carthage.
He said they work closely with a group in Joplin known as the Clean-Air Project to push for a ban on smoking in public places across the area.
“We meet on a regular basis, every third Tuesday of the month at the Fairview Christian Church,” Teed said. “We partner with a lot of people and a lot of organizations within town, Carthage Caring Communities is one, the Alliance of Southwest Missouri, and who all work on drug-free programs. We’ve also partnered with the Clean-Air Project, which is out of Joplin, also known as Smoke-Free Joplin, which they received a $250,000 grant in May of this year, so we’ve joined forces in one huge coalition and basically we do educational programs throughout the year.”
Teed said his group is sponsoring a speaker later at 8:30 p.m. today at Missouri Southern Criminal Justice Center auditorium to demonstrate the consequences of smoking.
“Her name is Renee Hicks, she’s a former athlete and she’s been a comedian for over 20 years,” Teed said. “She developed lung cancer while performing in these clubs and they had to remove one of her lungs so she’s our non-smoking advocate, we flew her in from Phoenix to do a presentation for us.”
Future ordinance
Earlier this summer, Teed, who is also a member of the Carthage City Council, introduced an ordinance to ban smoking in restaurants in the city. That proposal was tabled without a vote and several on the city council said they would vote against it but Teed said at some point in the future he wants to bring the issue back to the council.
“A long term goal for everyone who received a Missouri Foundation for Health grant would be to do a policy change,” Teed said. “We would propose to the council or any committees to remove smoking from all public places. It wouldn’t be just from restaurants, it would be all public places, anywhere from schools to restaurants to bars, anywhere where the public is involved.”
Teed said while he would push for the council to consider such an ordinance, he would abstain from any final vote because of his involvement in Smoke-Free Carthage.
Bell said the new McCune-Brooks hospital campus is smoke-free both inside and out.
“I think it’s really hard because people are under stress when they are sick and smoking is a stress-reliever for a lot of people,” Bell said. “So it is difficult to ask someone to please not smoke when they are at that facility, but it’s been good, most people have been very respectful of that policy and we have signs posted and if we see it happen we simply ask very nicely if they would please not smoke on our campus.”
Teed said the change would be good for the community and it does have support among Carthage residents. He said in two months, more than 1,000 people have become supporters of his group through the Internet and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. He said people can also go to the group’s Web site, www.smokefreecarthage.org.
“We’re in the early stages of effecting policy change here in Carthage,” Teed said. “A thousand people in two months I think is pretty good but we’ve got a lot more to do.”
History
In 1971, Arthur Mullaney, in Randolph, Mass., asked all smokers to quit for one day and donate the money they would have normally spent on cigarettes to a scholarship fund for the local school.
|
|
|
| | |
| | |
|
|
