According to a new research at Legacy® and Harvard School of Public Health, pictorial cigarette warnings on the packages can help smokers quit and save many lives, reports Medical Xpress.
The study looked at the difference in the effect of pictorial cigarette warning labels with only text warning labels across groups with different race, ethnicity and socioeconomic groups. The authors noted the disadvantage of text-only warning prints on the packages are likely to be overlooked and can hardly have an impact when compared with pictorial warnings.
"Interventions that have a positive impact on reducing smoking among the general population have often proven ineffective in reaching disadvantaged groups, worsening tobacco-related health disparities," said Jennifer Cantrell, DrPH, MPA, and Assistant Director for Research and Evaluation at Legacy®, a national public health foundation devoted to reducing tobacco use in the U.S, according to the report. "It's critical to examine the impact of tobacco policies such as warning labels across demographic groups."
The study included a group of over 3,300 smokers and their reactions to pictorial warnings on the cigarettes and text-only warnings were examined. As a result pictorial warnings were found to be of more impact than the text-only warnings. Smokers indicated a higher impact and encouraged them more to quit smoking. The pictorial warnings was enforced under the 2009 Family Smoking and Prevention Tobacco Control Act which plays an important role in helping smokers quit.
"The implementation of graphic warning labels appears to be one of the few tobacco control policies that have the potential to reduce communication inequalities across groups," Cantrell said.
"There is a nagging question whether benefits from social policies accrue equally across ethnic and racial minority and social class groups," said senior author Vish Viswanath, associate professor of society, human development, and health at Harvard School of Public Health. "The evidence from this paper shows that this new policy of mandated Graphic Health Warnings would benefit all groups. Given the disproportionate burden of tobacco-related disease faced by the poor and minorities, mandating strong pictorial warnings is an effective and efficient way to communicate the risk of tobacco use."
"Tobacco use is a social justice issue," said Donna Vallone, PhD, Senior Vice President for Research and Evaluation at Legacy®, according to Medical Xpress. "Given that low income and minority communities have higher smoking rates and suffer disproportionately from tobacco's health consequences, studies like this show us that graphic warning labels can help us reach these subgroups in a more effective way, ultimately saving more lives."
The study is published online in the journal PLOS ONE.
