By Cecilia Nasmith
Along with her monthly COVID-19 monthly update, Medical Officer of Health Dr. Natalie Bocking took some time at the January meeting of the Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge District Health Unit board of health meeting to give an update on the non-COVID work that carries on during the pandemic.
Dr. Bocking spotlighted the work of their two tobacco-control officers, who managed to carry on with this work in spite of being redeployed to support pandemic response at different times.
Much of this work centres on enforcement among vendors of regulations relating to their sales.
“In 2021, a number of warnings and tickets and charges actually increased, compared with the year 2020,” she said.
For example, warnings to vendors rose to 352 from the 88 issued in 2020. And 31 charges were laid, compared to 10 charges in 2020.
“Most of the 2021 charges were related to selling vaping products to underage youth, and we have new legislation that came into effect regarding the content of vaping products and the maximum amount of nicotine,” Dr. Bocking said.
“The emphasis is on making sure they are not sold to youth, as we know there are tremendous harmful impacts associated with youth taking up vaping and often moving on to smoking cigarettes after that.”
Continuing with year-end updates during the meeting – during which Cobourg Mayor John Henderson was re-elected as vice-chair, along with Doug Elmslie of the City of Kawartha Lakes getting another year as chair – Dr. Bocking noted that visits to the health-unit website are increasing. Their social-media strategy has been another way to get information out, she continued, though there is a certain demographic in the HKPR region that do not use social media – hence the importance of the 47 weekly media information sessions to keep members of the public updated through more traditional news media on the progress of the pandemic. This is not bad, she said, considering there are 52 weeks in the year, during which there was a transition to a new Medical Officer of Health early on.
