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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

David Hammond, PhD¹, Geoffrey T. Fong, PhD¹, Ron Borland, PhD², and K. Michael Cummings, PhD MPH³. (1) Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada, 519-888-4567, dhammond@uwaterloo.ca, (2) VicHealth Centre for Tobacco Control, 100 Drummond Street, Carlton, Victoria, 3053, Australia, (3) Department of Health Behavior, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences, Elm and Carlton Streets, Buffalo, NY 14263

Cigarette warning labels are a unique means of communicating the risks of smoking given their reach, frequency of exposure, and timing at the moment of smoking. Health warnings are also a prominent feature of The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC)—the world's first international public health treaty. We present data evaluating the impact of cigarette warnings using data from four countries: Canada, USA, UK, and Australia. Annual telephone surveys were conducted with nationally representative cohorts of adult smokers between 2002 and 2006 in each country. The findings indicate that health warnings on cigarette packages are a prominent source of health information: 65% of all smokers cited warning labels as a source of health information, second among sources only to television. Smokers who reported noticing health warnings were significantly more likely to endorse the health risks of smoking such as lung cancer and heart disease. In addition, in all five cases where labelling policies differed between countries, smokers living in countries with government mandated warnings reported greater health knowledge about cigarettes. For example, in Canada, where packages warn about the risks of impotence, smokers were 2.70 (2.43-3.00) times more likely to agree that smoking causes impotence relative to smokers from the other three countries. Changes in health warnings were also associated with increases in health knowledge. Findings on the impact of health warnings in Thailand and Malaysia will also be presented, along with issues related to constituent labelling and “light/mild” brand descriptors.

Learning Objectives:

• we were that the session abstract was the only one that needed learning objectives

Keywords: Tobacco Policy, Evaluation

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation