License to quit
Around the world smoking is marketed as a habit linked to health, happiness, wealth, power, beauty and virility. The reality is much less enticing – it leads to sickness, premature death, disease and infertility.
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There are currently 1.3 billion smokers in the world today and if current trends continue, around 500 million of those smokers will be killed by tobacco (World Health Organisation (WHO)). Tragically, with more than 80 per cent of those deaths occurring in the developing world, the epidemic will strike hardest in countries whose rapidly growing economies are offering their citizens the hope of a better future and tobacco companies a new marketplace.
Tobacco companies have been exporting the image of tobacco as a marker of success, beauty and virility to new markets in Asia and Africa for years. In return, Brazil, Malawi, India and China are now the top four exporters of tobacco in the world.
While countries like China, India and Russia are exporting cigarettes to the world, the Cancer Institute is exporting anti-tobacco campaigns to help stop the epidemic in its tracks.
Nirmala Pimenta, a project officer in Prevention, manages the campaign licenses for the Cancer Institute. “Our campaigns have a reputation worldwide as successful, so licensing of campaigns interstate and internationally continue to grow.
“Hard-hitting mass media campaigns about the health consequences of tobacco use are proven to save lives. In NSW they have helped contribute to a 4 per cent decline in smokers since 2003; their potential impact worldwide is colossal.”
The Bloomberg Global Initiative on Tobacco Control recognised the impact these campaigns can have on smokers globally and acted.
The Initiative is targeting 15 low- and middle-income countries where more than half of the world’s smokers live and that bear the highest burden of tobacco use: Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Russian Federation, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam.
The Cancer Institute’s Sponge campaign was selected by the Initiative to be added to a mass media resource library of highly effective tobacco control television campaigns. The universal appeal of the campaign and its ease of adaptation across nations has made it a popular campaign to be used in the priority countries.
Over the past two years, the campaign has been licensed through the World Lung Foundation for the Bloomberg Initiative and was aired in Russia, India, Kazakhstan and China and is scheduled to be aired in Georgia and Indonesia.
The results so far are promising…
Sponge has just finished running in Kazakhstan and will be seen in Indonesia and Georgia this year. In these three countries there are well over 150 million adult smokers.
Following the successful 2008 Sponge campaign in the Samara region of Russia, some 17 million Russians in the Moscow region were confronted by the ad in the autumn and winter of 2009–2010. Health authorities went so far as to position posters in Moscow’s bars and restaurants.
Of India’s one billion population, more than half use tobacco. Ten per cent of the world’s smokers live here. Sponge was seen by millions in 11 regional languages across India last year. Smokers exposed to the campaign were significantly more likely to say that they intend to quit in the future than those who were unexposed (70% vs. 66%).
China deserves special mention because of the enormity of the tobacco problem and the danger it poses. Nearly 60 per cent of Chinese men are smokers, and the country consumes more than 37 per cent of the world’s cigarettes. China’s monumental addiction is, according to Philip Morris, “the most important feature on the landscape”.
Sponge aired in three provinces across China. Although the results vary across the provinces one thing remains constant – smokers are concerned about their health and the campaign makes those fears real. In Tianjin more than half of smokers said the campaign made them concerned about the harm smoking was doing to their health. In Kunming 59 per cent of smokers were also concerned about their health.
“If our campaigns reach just 10 per cent of adult smokers and encourage them to quit, this would have a massive impact on global health,” Nirmala says.
“What’s exciting about the Bloomberg Initiative using our campaigns in China is that if the number of smokers who had seen the ad and were worried about their health quit, hypothetically speaking there would be around 175 million extra non-smokers in the world. That’s more than six times the population of Australia who have been directly affected by our campaigns in China alone.”
Independent of the Bloomberg Initiative Sponge and other campaigns have been licensed to the USA, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, Norway and Romania. A 100 per cent increase to calls to the Taiwanese Quitline after Sponge was launched is just the beginning.
According to WHO, the smoking rates of men have now peaked, and trends in low-and middle-resource countries indicate slow but sure declines. Women and girls are a different story.
The rise in tobacco use among younger females in countries with high populations is ominous. In many countries women have traditionally not used tobacco; women smoke at about a fourth of the rate of men. Because of this, the tobacco industry aggressively markets to them.
“Girls and women are both exploited and aggressively recruited by tobacco companies. Cigarette ads promise emancipation, whereas in reality smoking is yet another form of bondage for women,” says Judith Mackay, Director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control.
With the Cancer Institute campaigns on TV screens and billboards in the same countries tobacco companies are targeting, hopefully girls and women, boys and men alike will see that smoking is not the escape they were after.
As Nirmala sees it, “the Cancer Institute campaigns and organisations like the Bloomberg Initiative are turning the tide on smoking. This may be just the beginning, but at least we’ve started.”
Source: Shafey O, Eriksen M, Ross H, Mackay J. The Tobacco Atlas. 3rd edition. Atlanta, Georgia: The American Cancer Society, 2009.