Tomorrow's World No Tobacco Day has a media theme: Tobacco-Free Youth: Break the Tobacco Marketing Net.According to the AAP website,
"The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars worldwide on advertising, promotion, and sponsorship. Recent data from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey indicate an increase in tobacco use among adolescent girls in many countries. Much of this increase has been attributed to aggressive marketing by the tobacco industry, which encourages potential users, especially adolescents, to try tobacco and become long-term consumers.
Evidence-based tobacco-control strategies that are comprehensive, sustained, and support nonsmoking behaviors have been shown to prevent and reduce tobacco use. The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control calls on countries to implement scientifically proven measures to reduce tobacco use and its impact. Additional information on World No Tobacco Day 2008 activities is available at http://www.who.int/tobacco/wntd/2008/en/index.html."
The WHO interactive World No Tobacco Day website is worth exploring. Shaped like a web, it has buttons for each media industry that will take you to a page that then explains how that industry markets tobacco to youth. TV, movies, billboards, cultural events, sporting events, are among the many media venues listed in this web.
The AAP press release on World No Tobacco Day is worth reading, too. You'll find some interesting stats as well as ways the AAP has already worked with media groups to decrease the exposure of youth to tobacco.
Image: WHO Website
