By 1 July 2011 all cigarette packs in Norway shall carry a pictorial health warning.
-Research shows that pictorial warnings are far more efficient than textual warnings. Pictorial warnings are easier to remember, communicate health risks more clearly and increase the motivation to quit smoking, says State Secretary Ellen Birgitte Pedersen at the Ministry of Health and Care Services.

A public consultation was carried out earlier this year, and the proposed pictorial health warnings were supported by nearly all stakeholders.

The new regulations will come into force 1 January 2010. Cigarettes must carry pictorial health warnings by 1 July 2011 at the latest, while other tobacco products must carry such warnings by 1 January 2012.

Pictorial health warnings will reduce the advertising effect of brands and logos on tobacco products. Even though the Norwegian Parliament (Stortinget) has banned the visible display of tobacco products at points of sale from 1 January 2010, the tobacco product health warnings will still be visible after purchase.

The EU has developed a library of pictorial health warnings, and the selection of pictorial warnings to be used in Norway has been based upon submissions to the public hearing and recommendations from the Directorate for Health.

Regjeringen

Matthew Myers , president, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, worked closely with the US Congress to draft and enact a historic new law governing the manufacturing, marketing and sale of tobacco products in the US. In New Delhi recently to discuss how the Indian government, along with civil society, can accelerate and strengthen the tobacco control movement in India, he spoke to Yamini Lohia :

How serious is tobacco addiction amongst Indian youth?

Tobacco use in India is pervasive, with over 50 per cent of adult males using tobacco. Indian youth see tobacco use as inevitable given the large number of adult role models who use tobacco. Unless we change the number of adults who use tobacco, whether it is men smoking tobacco or women chewing tobacco, tobacco use is going to be an epidemic amongst youths in India for decades to come. We have to change both simultaneously. The problem with tobacco use isn’t that youth are too immature to decide whether or not to use it. It is that tobacco use is a social norm in India and young people model their parents, encouraged by images promoted by the tobacco industry through indirect and surrogate advertising and heavy promotion at the retail outlet.

India has taken an important step in eliminating direct advertising but the tobacco industry continues to have heavy promotional imagery at the retail outlets. Walking down a street in India, you can’t go past a kiosk without seeing tobacco prominently displayed at a level that’s inconsistent with the goal of discouraging tobacco use.

What specific policy interventions does the government need to make to discourage tobacco use?

There’s a lot more that India needs to do, beginning with enforcing the new law against smoking in bars, restaurants and other locations, so that we send a different social message. Second, India took a good step forward in changing its warnings on cigarettes, beedis and other tobacco products. But it needs to dramatically increase the strength of those warnings if they’re going to be effective. It’s particularly important that graphic warnings be used in India, where such a heavy percentage of the population who use beedis and oral tobacco products can’t read.

Beedi workers are cited as the reason why anti-tobacco legislation doesn’t make headway in the country.

First, with close to a million Indians a year dying from tobacco use, most of them from using beedis, it shouldn’t be a choice between protecting the health of citizens and preserving jobs. Indeed it’s not a choice. India ought to commit itself to reducing tobacco use among all Indians and at the same time helping those who work in the beedi industry to find an alternate means of livelihood. The quickest way to reduce tobacco use would be to increase the tax on those products and then to use those funds to assist the millions of beedi workers who want to get out of beedi rolling, and help them find alternative livelihoods

5 October 2009 Indiatimes

On Monday, the Tobacco Retailers’ Alliance were not best pleased that their conference stand in Brighton had been placed beneath a sign saying The Killers.

It was advertising a forthcoming show by an indie band and was clearly, the group believed, not a deliberate attempt to undermine their campaign against tobacco smuggling and tougher restrictions on the display of cigarettes in corner shops.

But still, pointed out one of the Alliance representatives on the stand, “it is not very helpful”.

Now – less than 24 hours later – The Killers sign has been replaced by the conference organisers with a Labour Party banner.

No one on the Tobacco Retailers stand wanted to talk about why the sign had been changed or even if they had asked the organisers to do something about it.

But they seemed a little happier than they were on Monday. All very strange.

They will no doubt be hoping that Labour takes a similar line when MPs vote next month on whether to force retailers to keep cigarettes hidden from view beneath shop counters to discourage teenagers from taking up the habit.

Although given the government’s long track record of tobacco control, they shouldn’t hold their breath.

ISLAMABAD: The country’s tobacco lobby may force the government to delay its decision over cigarette packs carrying pictorial health warnings, sources in the Health Ministry said on Sunday.

On World No Tobacco Day on May 31, the government had announced the introduction of pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs and had given the industry a six-month deadline to print them from January 1, 2010. However, soon after the announcement, the tobacco industry held a number of meetings with senior Health Ministry officials to attempt to reverse or delay the implementation of pictorial warnings. The ministry had started work on legislation for introduction of warnings on cigarette packs in consultation with the Ministry of Law, but the tobacco lobby is busy trying to delay the process.

Examples: The industry contended that it could not print the warnings within six months and quoted examples of Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Romania and India, which took more than two years to publish the pictorial warnings on cigarette packs. The picture-based health warnings are particularly significant for countries like Pakistan with poor literacy rate and inadequacy of resources for public health education, and where majority of the people cannot read warnings and remain oblivious to the harmful effects of tobacco use. By introducing pictorial warnings, Pakistan would join 30 countries having similar warnings. Pakistan is signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which binds more than 160 countries to use large, clear, visible and legible warnings on packs and outer packaging

The health ministry is developing a new set of pictorial warnings for tobacco products to be put in place from next year. This move came after the ministry was flooded with complaints that the current warnings were ineffective.

Tobacco manufacturers print the pictorial warning in such a way that they don’t cover 40 per cent area of the pack as mandated in the tobacco control law.

The content of the warning is also not visible in most cases and a few products don’t print the warnings at all, said B. K. Prasad, health ministry official incharge of tobacco control measures.

All these are serious violations of the law and concerned government agencies have been told to take action.

” We received a lot of complaints about the way warnings are being printed on tobacco packs and we have taken a serious view of it,” said Prasad, while talking on the sidelines of a the World Health Organization ( WHO) conference on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

A WHO official said warnings on cigarette packets hardly depict a pair of lungs diseased by tobacco smoke. ” It looks more like an image of a person wearing an oversized tie, minus the head,” he said.

In the case of chewing tobacco packs – which carry the picture of a scorpion – the makers are misleading people by informally projecting it as a government ” seal of quality”. Besides pictorial warnings on tobacco products and ban on smoking in public places – which are measures to cut the demand of tobacco products – the government also initiated steps to address the supply side as well, Prasad said.

Programmes have been launched to wean tobacco farmers away from growing tobacco and to offer alternative livelihood to people engaged in bidi rolling.

At present, nearly five million people are engaged in the bidi industry.

“The tobacco lobby has used tobacco farmers and bidi workers – to stall many steps to curb the menace in the country,” minister of state for health Dinesh Trivedi at the conference.

“Overcoming pressure from this lobby is a big challenge for tobacco control in India.”


Courtesy: Mail Today