The efficacy of cigarette new warning labels

Egypt is one of those states where patients can sometimes light up a cigarette in hospital rooms. In Egypt offering a cigarette became a common habit as a handclasp.

Cigarette smoking is a very common habit in this country. You can find cigarette smokers almost everywhere you go. But now the government is getting serious about the health risks, it lunched a new campaign of stark visual warnings about tobacco's dangers.

Starting August 1, cigarette labels in Egypt will be required to carry images of the effects of smoking, images such as: a dying man in an oxygen mask, a coughing child and a limp cigarette symbolizing impotence.

The new legislation represents a major step in Egypt. For Egyptians discussion of smoking health risks is nearly nonexistent that’s why for them the smoking prohibition is a dramatic change. Researchers think that the labels with the impotence message will have the most distinct effect on Egyptians because "they are really concerned about that."

The same dramatic changes took place not only in Egypt but also in twelve countries, including Canada, Jordan, Brazil and Thailand, states which required also graphic photos of the effects of smoking to be printed on cigarette packs.

Egypt is one of the top 15 smoking countries in the world: nearly 60 percent of all adult males in the country of 79 million people use tobacco, compared to 24 percent of men in the United States. Smoking is widespread even among those people who know the detrimental effects about tobacco use.

In the hallways of the Health Ministry, "no smoking" signs are ubiquitous - as are buckets of sand filled with cigarette butts from smokers ignoring the rule.

But, he says, the government appears to have realized the depth of the public health problem "not just in human capacity and lives, but the cost in dealing with all the disease generated by it."

For the new label requirements, authorities field-tested a variety of images.

They found that warnings linking tobacco with death were not particularly effective with Egyptians, since dying is perceived as inevitable anyway. Also, images of diseased lungs left people confused about what was being shown.

Instead, the new warnings focus on threats to health and, particularly, to family, like the effect on children and pregnant women and the risk of impotence.

"We need something to give the smokers a shock that they are in great danger," said Dr. Mohammed Mehrez, head of the tobacco control department.

Earlier this year, the state-owned manufacturer, Eastern Tobacco Company, voluntarily put pictures of diseased lungs on some packs - but smokers just figured those packs were the ones that were harmful and switched to others, which some shop owners promptly started selling at a higher price.

Researchers showed that the new cigarettes labels are more effective because now some Egyptians are convinced that light cigarettes lead to impotence, in such a way the tobacco warnings labels represent a potentially effective method of influencing attitudes and behaviors.