World No Tobacco Day 2009
Showing the truth: Health warnings on tobacco
Tomorrow is World No Tobacco Day. This year theme for the Day is "Tobacco Health Warnings". Health warnings on tobacco product packaging are critical to any effective tobacco control strategy. They increase public awareness of the serious health risks of tobacco use and help to ensure that the packaging tells the truth about the deadly product within. Tobacco package health warnings that include images are a particularly powerful and cost-effective vehicle for communicating health risks. Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death. More than 1.2 million people die every year in South-East Asia Region due to tobacco use. The wide-spread use of tobacco products in the Region has resulted from unrestricted use of marketing tools by the tobacco industry, the addictive nature of nicotine and the lack of knowledge about the harmful effects of tobacco products among tobacco users and non-users in the form of second-hand tobacco smoke. The lack of regulation of the tools of a product that kills half of its users has exposed the population to the misinformation of the tobacco industry about the suitability of their products. Yet tobacco product packaging in most countries provides little or no information of warn consumers of the risks. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in its Article 11 mandates that countries should enact effective measures to ensure appropriate health warnings on tobacco products packages. It also says that these health warnings should be rotating, large, clear, visible, legible and include pictures or pictograms and occupy at least 50 percent or more and no less than 30 percent of the principal display areas. Comprehensive health warnings about the dangers of tobacco use play a vital role in changing its image, especially among adolescents and young adults. Text and pictorial health warnings are useful to communicate the health risks of tobacco use, provoke more thought about the health risks of tobacco use and have a greater emotional response and generate increased motivation and intention to quit. They are particularly effective in communicating health effects to comparative low literate populations, children and young people.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments