Environment: Profile
Mai Anh Hoang never planned to work in tobacco control. It was a bureaucratic snafu that first sent her into the fight against the deadly epidemic in Southeast Asia.
In 2001, I went to Vietnam to work on nutrition projects with a nongovernmental organization. Vietnam is where I was born—I was 13 months old when we left in 1975.There were some delays with the funding on our nutrition project, so I ended up mostly working in tobacco control instead. Smoking in Vietnam today is like what it was in the U.S. in the 1950s. More than half of males over 15 smoke. There are no smoke-free areas, not even in hospitals. About 50 percent of doctors smoke.
We did education campaigns, media campaigns. We got 14 restaurants to start smoke-free areas. We worked on developing a social network for anybody who’s interested in the issue.
Then I came to the Bloomberg School to work with the Institute for Global Tobacco Control. I work on training and capacity-building projects for Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand. We’re training people to implement strong tobacco control policies and to measure their impact over time.
I never thought I’d work in tobacco control. It’s a hard sell. And you always have to help people understand why it’s a public health issue, why it’s not just a personal choice issue. But it’s hard to let go. There are so few people working in it, or trying to get resources for it. You feel like it would be a real loss if you dropped out. It’s important work.