News

Smoking still too common in movies, CDC says

The number of U.S. movies showing people smoking has declined since 2005, but cigarettes still feature in far too many films and could be influencing young people to take up the habit, according to a new report.

The report's authors recommended that movie ratings also consider whether the film depicts smoking and suggested strong advertisements about the dangers of smoking precede movies that show tobacco use.
"The results of this analysis indicate that the number of tobacco incidents peaked in 2005, then declined by approximately half through 2009, representing the first time a decline of that duration and magnitude has been observed," the team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of California San Francisco and elsewhere wrote.
"However, nearly half of popular movies still contained tobacco imagery in 2009, including 54 percent of those rated PG-13, and the number of incidents remained higher in 2009 than in 1998," they added in the CDC's weekly report on death and illness.
Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Edward Markey and Republican Joseph Pitts, who both serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote the Motion Picture Association of America encouraging the industry to adopt stronger anti-smoking measures.
"Exposure to onscreen smoking in movies increases the probability that youths will start smoking. Youths who are heavily exposed to onscreen smoking are approximately two to three times more likely to begin smoking than youths who are lightly exposed," the CDC report reads.
The researchers counted each time tobacco use was shown in the biggest-grossing films of 1991 to 2009.
"This analysis shows that the number of tobacco incidents increased steadily after the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the state attorneys general and the major cigarette companies, in which the companies agreed to end brand placement," they wrote.
They said the Motion Picture Association of America had done little to make changes but noted some studios had made voluntary changes and said Viacom was the first company whose movies rated for youth showed no use of tobacco in 2009.
They suggested more policies could encourage filmmakers to do better.
"Such policies could include having a mature content (R) rating for movies with smoking, requiring strong antitobacco ads preceding movies that depict smoking, not allowing tobacco brand displays in movies, and requiring producers of movies depicting tobacco use to certify that no person or company associated with the production received any consideration for that depiction," they wrote.

Source: Reuters News, 19 August 2010

Richard Branson - Children and cigarettes

Parliament has already voted to protect children by putting tobacco out of sight in shops and removing cigarette machines. Unless the Government takes the next step of rolling out regulations, these changes will not happen.
Allowing tobacco to continue to be displayed to children, along with easy access via vending machines, is unacceptable.
Although tobacco advertising has been banned on television, in print and on billboards, children are still routinely tempted to smoke by colourful tobacco displays in shops, newsagents and supermarkets.
There is huge public support for tougher controls on tobacco. About three quarters of people surveyed back the measures.
Each day, approximately 450 under-18-year-olds start smoking across Britain. Half of all long-term smokers will die from the addiction and smoking remains the single biggest preventable cause of death in the country.
I back Cancer Research UK's call to put tobacco out of sight and urge the Government to put the health of children before the profits of tobacco companies. This is one of the best ways to reduce the devastating impact that tobacco has on the lives of so many people.

Source: The Telegraph, 20 August 2010

Smoking Linked to Teen Migraines

Teens are more likely to have chronic headaches or migraines when they are overweight, smoke cigarettes, or get little or no exercise, new research shows.
Teenagers in the study with all three negative lifestyle factors had a more than threefold greater likelihood of having frequent, severe headaches than normal-weight, active teens who did not smoke.
Headaches are a common complaint among teenagers, with 5% of teenage boys and almost 8% of teenage girls in one nationwide study reporting frequent migraines. In another study of older teens in Poland, 28% reported having had a migraine headache.
While obesity, smoking, and other lifestyle factors have been shown to influence the frequency and severity of chronic headaches in adults, the new study, published in the journal Neurology, is among the first to explore the relationship in teenagers.
The study is the first to examine the individual impact of specific negative lifestyle factors like obesity and smoking, says study researcher John-Anker Zwart, MD, PhD, of the University of Oslo.
"We were surprised by how many teenagers with headaches smoked or were overweight or physically inactive," Zwart tells WebMD. "We were also surprised that the impact of these negative lifestyle factors seemed to add up."
The research included almost 6,000 students in Norway between the ages of 13 and 18 interviewed about their recent headache history. They also were asked if they smoked and how much they exercised.
Roughly one in five teens (19%) said they were smokers, 16% were overweight, and 31% reported exercising less than twice a week.
Overall, about a third of the girls (36%) and one-fifth of the boys (21%) reported having recurrent headaches within the past year.
More than half (55%) of the overweight, sedentary teens who smoked reported recent frequent headaches, compared to one in four teens with none of these lifestyle factors.
Compared to normal-weight, active, nonsmoking teens, overweight teens, and teens who smoked were 40% and 50%, respectively, more likely to have frequent headaches. Exercising less than twice a week was associated with a 20% increase in the likelihood of frequent headaches.
It is not clear from the research if the negative lifestyle factors caused the frequent headaches or if they act more as triggers in already vulnerable teens.

Source: WebMD, 18 August 2010

Smoking in China as serious as SARS

The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in China said Tuesday widespread smoking in the Asian nation should be given the same attention as an outbreak of the deadly SARS disease.
Timed to coincide with the release of new data on adult tobacco use in China by the country's centre for disease control, Michael O'Leary said the Asian nation's widespread tobacco addiction was a worry.
"China's longstanding high prevalence of tobacco addiction deserves the same level of concern as an outbreak of SARS or H1N1," he said.
"Chronic conditions now constitute the lion's share of the burden of disease in China, and tobacco use is the single largest preventable cause of death and disease."
According to the WHO, the data showed that more than half of men in China smoked, and that a total of 301 million adults currently puffed on cigarettes - a drop from the previous figure of 350 million.
A total of 13,354 people across China took part in the survey from October last year to May 2010 which also revealed that 70 per cent of non-smoking adults were exposed to secondhand smoke in a typical week.
China is the world's biggest consumer of tobacco, and up to one million people in the country die every year from lung cancer or cardiovascular diseases directly linked to smoking.
Authorities have pledged to ban smoking in all indoor, public places by next year, but activists and experts have raised doubts that the rules can be implemented in a country where law enforcement is weak.
In an indication of the extent of the problem, 56.8 per cent of all male doctors in China smoke and some hospitals are not tobacco-free, state media reported earlier this year.
China's centre for disease control was not immediately available for comment.

Source:WA Today, 17 August 2010