Michael Rubens Bloomberg - ELF Award winner 2008

October 7, 2008 - On Sunday, October 5, 2008 the European Lung Foundation (ELF) award was awarded to Michael Rubens Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, to mark his outstanding contributions to combat tobacco use worldwide.

Michael Bloomberg has donated $375 million over six years to five key partner organizations (The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation, The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, The World Health Organisation and The World Lung Foundation). This campaign aims to help people quit smoking and reduce the number of deaths caused by smoking, by improving anti-smoking education, increasing the price of tobacco and making more places smoke free.

As an example of Bloomberg’s work, New York City now has 200,000 fewer smokers than it did four years ago. Bloomberg has more than doubled tobacco control funding in low and middle income countries to try and extend this success across the world.

The funding provided by Bloomberg has already enabled the formation of MPOWER^**, a package of the six most important and effective tobacco control policies that are proven to reduce tobacco use. Once these policies are enforced together, they will prevent young people from starting to smoke, will help current smokers to quit, will protect non-smokers against the dangers of second hand tobacco smoke and will free citizens worldwide from the harm of tobacco.

If smoking rates continue to stay at current levels without intervention, a predicted one billion people are expected to die from tobacco use this century. Bloomberg’s generous contribution has the potential to save thousands of lives by benefitting the world’s smokers and non-smokers.

**MPOWER:
Monitor tobacco use and the policies to prevent it .
Protect people from tobacco smoke
Offer people help to quit tobacco use
Warn about the dangers of tobacco
Enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship
Raise taxes on tobacco

Reference: Michael Rubens Bloomberg - ELF Award winner 2008, European Lung Foundation, 10/5/2008.

ELF is the public voice of the European Respiratory Society.