Battle against Tobacco & Cancer….Teena Thacker
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come out with nine new health warnings for cigarette packs, to be introduced from September 2012. Various countries already have such warnings, and some of them attribute reduced tobacco use to these. India has faced hurdles introducing visuals more graphic than those that are already being displayed on packs.
A comparison between the efforts of the two countries:
India
Pictorial warnings are already on display but a need to change them was felt them after a survey revealed that the existing ones, showing a scorpion on bidi packs and a cancer-affected lung on cigarette packs, were not making the desired impact.
Since its constitution, a group of ministers has already delayed the implementation of new pictorial warnings for two years, diluted stronger warnings, and reduced the size of the warnings from 50 per cent of the principal display area to 40 per cent.
Following a law in effect since 2009, the warnings should have been changed in March 2010 but the government extended the time to December 1, 2010, and could not meet this deadline either. This is apparently because of differences among cabinet ministers.
A warning depicting mouth cancer had been shortlisted by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad but some ministers objected to it, calling it gory. The Health Ministry thereafter decided to go to the cabinet, which decided not to change the current pictorial warnings for one more year. The cabinet had also asked the Health Ministry to give a wider choice to manufactures, and the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) to pitch in.
The DAVP sent pictures in March this year and the Health Minister shortlisted some last month; four pictures each of lung and oral cancer, for both smoking and smokeless tobacco products. According to the new notification, manufacturers will have to display the pictures from December 1. A senior official in the ministry disclosed that manufacturers have already started approaching them to dilute the pictures as it could harm their business.
Statistics show nearly 0.9 million deaths occur in India every year due to tobacco use compared with 5.5 million deaths worldwide.
It is disheartening to see that India, where more than 2,500 people die daily due to tobacco use, took about two years to finally notifying the new set of stronger warnings, said Binoy Mathew, communications officer, tobacco control, in the Voluntary Health Assocaition of India.
United States
The FDAs new pictorials mark the first change in warnings in more than 25 years. Warning labels first appeared on US cigarette packs in 1965, and current warning labels that feature a small box with text were put on cigarette packs in the mid-1980s. Changes to more graphic warning labels that feature colour images of the negative effects of tobacco use were mandated in a law passed in 2009.
Before this, the US had some of the weakest cigarette warnings in the world. The 2009 law, for the first time, gave the federal government authority to regulate tobacco.
The FDA believes these will decrease the number of smokers, resulting in lives saved, increased life expectancy, and lower medical costs. Beginning September 2012, FDA will require larger, more prominent cigarette health warnings on all cigarette packaging and advertisements in the United States, it says.
The FDAs nine warnings have pictures of rotting teeth, mouth lesions, diseased lungs and the sewn-up corpse of a smoker, with written warnings like Cigarettes are addictive, Tobacco smoke can harm your children, Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease, Cigarettes cause cancer, and Smoking during pregnancy can harm your baby.
The warnings were selected based on their ability to effectively communicate the health risks of smoking to the public, says the FDA. In making selections, FDA considered its review of relevant scientific literature, more than 1,700 public comments…
Although its impossible to attribute reduced smoking rates to any single cause, in Canada, Brazil, Thailand and other countries, stronger warnings have been associated with an increase in the number of smokers trying to quit.
We are so far behind, AP quoted Michael Cummings of the US-based Roswell Park Cancer Institutes Department of Health Behavior as saying. Were a third world nation when it comes to educating the public on the risks of smoking.
Tobacco is responsible for about 443,000 deaths in the US a year.
WORLDWIDE
Uruguay: 80% of front and back of all cigarettes packs must be devoted to warnings. One version shows a person smoking a battery like its a cigarette; both contain cadmium.
brazil: Labels feature graphic images of dead foetuses, haemorrhaging brains and gangrened feet are carried on cigarette boxes. They fill an entire face of the cigarette box. In a WHO survey, many smokers said these gory warnings had boosted their desire to quit.
Canada: Pictorial warnings mandatory since 2000 on cigarette packs. With other steps in place, smoking rate fell to 20% from 26%
EU: Since 2001, tobacco products display text warnings, pictures an option.
China: Its warnings are among the weakest in the world. Text-only warnings are printed in small font and do not spell out specific risks. Companies are allowed to design their own labels as long as they meet minimum requirements. 1 million smokers die each year.