Educating people about the health risks of smoking causes large and ongoing reductions in population smoking rates a new modelling study suggests.
US scientist Dr Carl V Phillips and Dr Marewa Glover of a New Zealand based research Centre modelled the decline in smoking rates in the US following the release of the 1964 US Surgeon General’s report ‘Smoking Kills’.
The report triggered a decade of mass education about the substantial risks to health caused by smoking.
Published in the current issue of the American Journal of Health Behaviour, the study ‘How much ongoing smoking reduction is echoes of the initial mass education’ proposes that parents during 1965-1975, who stopped smoking, influenced lower uptake of smoking among their children.
Parental smoking is an established strong predictor of smoking uptake in children.
The inter-generational effect of less parents smoking, generation after generation, accounted for about one-third of the decline in smoking that occurred in the US between 1978 and 2010.
Centre of Research Excellence – SCOOP – 2022-03-04.