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Working Together for Tobacco Control in Vietnam

WLF has worked throughout the past year and a half with local partners in Vietnam to develop a national mass media campaign. The goals were to increase the public's awareness about the harms of smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke, and to generate support for national tobacco control policies and legislation. The campaign is called "Cigarettes are Eating You Alive" and it aired across Vietnam from December 2009-January 2010.

We have just returned from our fourth WLF trip to Hanoi, where on May 5 the new head of the Ministry of Health's Steering Committee on Smoking and Health (VINACOSH), Dr. Luong Ngoc Khue, announced the evaluation results of the "Cigarettes are Eating You Alive" campaign to a packed room of around 75 journalists [press release]. Since this press meeting 90 media reports have appeared on television, in the press and online in Vietnam. These reports have been productively telling the story about the effectiveness of the campaign in communicating tobacco-related harms and encouraging smokers to quit and non-smokers to avoid this exposure. Other media stories have been skillfully and effectively personalising the grim story of tobacco-related illness.

This powerful wave of tobacco control media coverage was not simply achieved by having a strong story to tell. Rather, it was facilitated by a very positive partnership between WLF and the American Cancer Society (ACS), who were also in Hanoi during that first week of May to conduct an advanced tobacco control media training program with Vietnamese journalists. The press meeting to announce the campaign results was immediately followed by the tobacco control media training program, developed by ACS Vietnam program manager Tuyet Ha-Iaconis, her team, and VINACOSH staff to foster collaborations between 28 journalists and several tobacco control advocates.

In addition to the news coverage generated by the press meeting, the coordination of the WLF and ACS events created real synergies for the two organizations. It also produced extensive media coverage by providing very topical news content for the journalists to incorporate in the stories they needed to write as part of the training program. These stories included extensive coverage of the mass media campaign results, as well as emotionally charged feature articles about real people suffering from devastating tobacco-related illness.

Coordination of efforts among international agencies is often easier to plan than it is to execute, but this was one of those occasions where the benefits have been tangible and significant. We look forward to continuing WLF's work in close collaboration with our in-country and international partners to maximise the effectiveness of this investment in reducing the devastating toll of tobacco in Vietnam.