Warning picture on tobacco products from 31st May 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Now it is the time to quit smoking! Smokers may think twice before lighting up from Sunday. All the harmful health effects of tobacco like cancer & death, deformity and sterility would be highlighted in the form of pictorial warnings on tobacco products starting Sunday, May 31 2009.Starting May 31, the World No Day, all tobacco products will carry graphic pictorial warnings like the skull and cross bones or a cancer-disfigured face or diseased lungs to highlight the hazards of tobacco intake.
The pictorial warning would occupy 40 percent of the space on the front of all packets of tobacco products.
"According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), India records about 800,000 tobacco deaths every year or 2,200 deaths a day. The pictorial warnings are a big breakthrough. They will help in sensitising people about tobacco hazards and new tobacco consumers will think twice before taking these products," Bhavna Mukhopadhaya of Voluntary Health Association of India (VHAI) said.
In India, over half of men (57 percent) in the age group of 15-49 years use tobacco in some form and over a tenth (10.9 percent) of women in this age group also use tobacco, according to a National Family Health Survey conducted in 2005-06.
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