The Commission recently adopted a series of 14 new written health warnings to appear on cigarette packages. This comes at a time when the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive represents one of the main public health challenges of the moment. .
On 7 March 2012, the European Commission adopted a new set of 14 written health warnings] to appear on cigarettes packages in the future. These warnings have been chosen following on from a special Eurobarometer conducted to assess the perception of a selected population on different messages.
What came out of the discussions is that using some specific themes (when developing the warnings) would have a bigger impact on the smoker attitude. These themes are as follows:
– “Any mention of ‘cancer’,
– The provision of clear, unequivocal connection with smoking,
– Any reference to a life threatening condition,
– Any reference to potential harm of children,
– The inclusion of new information,
– Messages with relevance to a broad audience,
– The inclusion of statistics“.
14 warnings (out of the 24 initially suggested) have been chosen on the basis of these themes.
They are the following:
– “Smoking causes 9 out of 10 lung cancers”
– “Smoking causes mouth and throat cancer”
– “Smoking doubles the risk of cervical cancer”
– “Smoking destroys your lungs”
– “Smoking causes heart attacks”
– “Smoking causes strokes and severe disability”
– “Smoking causes leg amputations”
– “Smoking causes blindness”
– “Smoking can kill your unborn child”
– “Your smoke harms your children, family and friends”
– “Quit now – stay alive for your children”
– “If you smoke, your children will smoke”
– “Smoking makes it harder to have children”
– “Smoking reduces your sexual performance”.
Background information
While it has been proven that the written health warnings that appear on tobacco packages do have an impact on consumer choices, they need to be regularly updated to maximise this impact.
The adoption of 14 new written health warnings comes at a time when the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive represents one of the main public health challenges. Plain packaging and pictorial health warnings are amongst the most debated issues related to the revision of the Directive. Knowing that the combination of written and pictorial health warnings is likely to have a bigger impact on consumer choice (i.e not begin to smoke or quitting smoking), the newly adopted written health warnings can be saluted as an important step in tobacco control.
– EPHA Position on the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive