Anti-Smoking Campaigns With the passage of tougher new restric

With the passage of tougher new restrictions on smoking recently, the antismoking movement has intensified. The movement has been taken up by health organizations across the country, as well as the federal governments and many state governments, with many health communication campaigns being designed to combat health problems, including and especially smoking. However, overall, recent research is showing that Americans are not pursuing quitting smoking in the 1990s with the same zeal they were in the 1980s. Some of that may be from confusion over conflicting messages from the media. Health communication campaigns must clarify and simplify information and create campaigns with the same spirit and informative entertainment value as any elite advertising agency would.

Health Communication Campaigns Against Smoking

On a bright, brisk spring afternoon last week, Bill Clinton threw out the first ball at the Cleveland Indians' opening-day game. The president had just helped kick off the baseball season in Jacobs Field, a sleek, brand-new, $169 million stadium, a large chunk of which was financed by a 4.5 cents-a-pack local tax on cigarettes. Yet no one, no matter where they are sitting, is permitted to smoke in the open-air stands. This is the type of conflicting information that health communication professionals have to deal with, not only on a city by city basis, but also on a day by day basis. These forlorn scenes may be just a transitional phase. Surgeon Gener

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popular, and spittoons were commonplace in bars and restaurants. When an epidemic of tuberculosis broke out and the disease was linked to spittoons, a doctors' group that eventually became the American Lung Association campaigned to have them removed. Pertschuk says, "At the time, it was considered to be outrageous and anti-American to get rid of spittoons. When historians look back on this [smoking] controversy in 25 years, they will think it was very strange that there were ashtrays and smokers in bars" ("Leadership," 1989, p. 11). People like Mark Pertschuk and organizations like Americans for Nonsmokers Rights provide support and ideas for health communication campaigns. A study directed by Diane Bild at the National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with a projected start of a new antismoking campaign by the American Heart Association, showed that, as of 1992, secondhand smoke, defined as smoke inhaled by a nonsmoker residing with a smoker, was a proven human carcinogen that caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year in nonsmokers. The report also blamed secondhand smoke for up to 26,000 cases of asthma in children, 20 percent of annual asthma attacks in children, and 15,000 hospitalizations of children each year because of

Category: Medical - A