The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, released Thursday, found that while the trend of tobacco use among US middle and high school has declined over the past decade, the decreasing rate is lower and leveling off.
Though the subsequent decline is encouraging, there is an urgent need for preventive measures so that the positive trend does not reverse itself.
The CDC report says, "The findings from this report suggest further efforts are needed to counter tobacco industry influences on youths.
“New Food and Drug Administration regulations which prohibit the distribution of free samples of smokeless tobacco to youths and prohibit tobacco brand name sponsorship of any athletic, musical or other social or cultural events are designed to help prevent tobacco use among youths."
The National Youth Tobacco Survey
The report was based on the analysis of a statistics gathered by National Youth Tobacco Survey.
As a part of the survey, school based teens were asked to fill out a voluntary and confidential questionnaire each year from 2000 to 2009.
A total of 22,679 youngsters participated. In addition to cigarettes smoking, the kids were asked about use of cigars, smokeless tobacco, pipes, small brown cigarettes wrapped in leaves (called bidis) and clove cigarettes (AKA: kreteks).
"Current use" was classified as lighting up on at least one occasion in the past 30 days while experimentation was defined as having smoked a cigarette, even a puff or two, but fewer than 100 cigarettes.
Pattern of decline in tobacco use
The researchers found that use of tobacco among high school kids dropped from 34.5 percent to 23.9 percent while that of cigarette smoking declined from 28 percent to 17.2 percent.
In middle school students, the use of tobacco dropped from 15.1 percent to 8.2 percent while smoking cigarettes decreased from 11 percent to 5.2 percent.
Experimentation with tobacco declined from 39.4 to 30.1 percent in high school kids while in middle school students the decrease was from 29.8 to 15 percent.
The report also found out that between 2006 and 2009 the use of cigarettes dropped only among middle and high school girls and non-Hispanic whites.
The authors state, "To further decrease tobacco use and susceptibility to use among youths, restrictions on advertising, promotion, and availability of tobacco products to youths should be combined with full implementation of evidence-based, community wide, comprehensive tobacco control policies.”
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