Anti-tobacco effort for kids educates, turns stomachs

It's no ordinary children's book, this tome called "Huff and Puff" by Patricia Kelleher, a nurse in the Anne Arundel County public school system.

A homemade, hand-illustrated paperback, its pages stand 3 feet high. Its story turns the Big Bad Wolf into a chain smoker. By the last page, that fearsome figure is as harmless to others as Little Bo Peep.

The old wolf's nasty habit, it seems, has so defiled his lungs that he can't blow anything down.

"The [main] question in the story, of course, is 'Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?' " says Kelleher, the longtime school nurse at Freetown Elementary in Glen Burnie. "By the end, even the kindergartners know the answer: Nobody!"

How do you convince a child never to take up smoking? It can't hurt to lay out the facts: that using tobacco leads to cancer, emphysema and gangrene, that it kills 5 million people around the world each year and that it costs more than $2,000 every 12 months just to support a pack-a-day habit, among other filthy truths.

But if you hope to reach people between 4 and 17, as the Anne Arundel County Department of Health does during its annual Tobacco-Free Kids Week starting Monday, you'll do what Kelleher does: Come up with methods so vivid they'll leave a mark stronger than stink in the drapes.

"I use [ideas] that attract their eyes, that involve them, that affect their senses," says Kelleher, who will use "Huff and Puff" and other teaching tools in more than a dozen schools next week, all as part of an initiative that will reach thousands of young people over seven days. "It's the best way to reach our goal — to nip [smoking] in the bud."