The Health Ministry is drafting a bill by which to ban smoking in public places.  The authorities aim to reduce the number of smokers by 15% until 2017, Health Minster Andrei Usatyi said in a news conference held to mark the World No Tobacco Day, IPN reports.

Andrei Usatyi said that this year’s slogan of the anti-smoking campaign is: “Let’s ban advertising of tobacco, promotion and sponsoring”. The number of smoking persons has increased over the last ten years, while 10% of the deaths are due to smoking. Advertising of tobacco should be reduced to zero as one third of the new smokers said that adverts made them try certain cigarettes.

“The costs in healthcare associated with the diseases caused by cigarette smoking were estimated at 450 million lei. The economic costs related to hospitalization and ambulatory treatment of diseases caused by smoking in 2012 totaled about 880 million lei, which is equal to the incomes collected into the budget from selling tobacco products,” said the minister.

The representatives of the World Health Organization Office in Moldova Silviu Domente said there was initiated a nationwide anti-smoking communication campaign focusing on the current and potential smokers. Three anti-smoking video clips in Romanian and Russian were produced and distributed for broadcasting within the campaign.