Today, Prof. Dr. Mahmoud Al-Matini Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Ain Shams University, opened the launch of a project on the relationship between smoking and pregnant women under the title "Developing the capacity of healthcare providers in Egypt to apply advice to pregnant women and their families in relation to smoking cessation and avoidance of passive smoke". The conference is organized by the Department of Community Medicine and Environment in collaboration with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Faculty and New York University of America.

The conference discussed the continued use of the global tobacco epidemic in the transition from high-income to low- and middle-income countries, with the recent increase in smoking prevalence among women, which is expected to rise to 20% by 2025. Passive smoking has become an increasingly important problem, according to a 14-nation health survey. The percentage of Egyptians exposed to domestic smoking is 65.2%, according to the 2012 CDC report. In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the effects of smoking on fetal weight are not limited to the fact that the mother is a smoker during pregnancy or not, but also includes passive smoking, where the risk of having an underweight child is 22% according to WHO2013.

Prof. Dr. Wageda Abdulrahman Anwar, Professor of Community and Environmental Medicine at Ain Shams University and the project leader, stressed that quitting smoking before 16 weeks of pregnancy or until the end of the third quarter has many health benefits.  The cessation of smoking will result in giving birth of a semi-normal baby who is weight-appropriate. She noted that there are no safe levels of exposure to smoke and non-smokers.

She added that the goal of the project is to develop and implement a basic training curriculum for doctors and nurses to be applied during prenatal care, and to disseminate the objectives of the program to stop smoking and passive smoking among pregnant women through the development of a training of trainers' model. She pointed out that the duration of the implementation of the project is 36 months in the hospital of women and obstetrics at Ain Shams University, other university hospitals, in addition to hospitals of the Ministry of Health and Population, and private hospitals.