Egypt intoduces graphic cigarette warnings, starting August 1st

With effect from the 1st of August, cigarette packs in Egypt will feature graphic health warnings, informing smokers of the devastating health effects of smoking. Images will include: a dying man in an oxygen mask, a coughing child, a fetus with a warning of the harm to pregnancy, or a limp cigarette, symbolizing impotence.

Source: Jackie Tumwine's blog.

With effect from the 1st of August, cigarette packs in Egypt will feature graphic health warnings, informing smokers of the devastating health effects of smoking. Images will include: a dying man in an oxygen mask, a coughing child, a fetus with a warning of the harm to pregnancy, or a limp cigarette, symbolizing impotence.

Source: Jackie Tumwine's blog.

Egypt is fulfilling one of her treaty obligations under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which require state parties to introduce, among other tobacco control measures, large, graphic health warnings on cigarette packs.

The photos below from Egypt's Ministry of Health show a series of four new tobacco warning labels which will appear on packets of cigarettes sold in the country.

The limp cigarette symbolizes impotence. The message in Arabic reads, "Warning, smoking damages the health and causes death. The damaging effect of smoking harms the smoker and the non-smoker. Smoking for a long period of time affects marital relations".

This tobacco warning label in Arabic reads, "Warning, smoking damages the health and causes death. The damaging effect of smoking harms the smoker and the non smoker. Smoking around pregnant women harms the fetus and causes miscarriage".

This tobacco warning label in Arabic reads, "Warning, smoking damages the health and causes death. The damaging effect of smoking harms the smoker and the non smoker. Smoking affects children - protect your children from smoking".

This tobacco warning label in Arabic reads, "Warning, smoking damages the health and causes death. The damaging effect of smoking harms the smoker and the non smoker. Smoking causes diseases of the heart and circulatory system".

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The article below from the Associated Press gives details of the new Egyptian cigarette health warnings.

Egypt uses stark warnings in anti-smoking campaign
By Paul Schemm, Associated Press

Offering a cigarette is as common as a handshake in Egypt, where the culture of smoking is so entrenched that patients and friends sometimes light up in hospital rooms.

But now, the government is finally getting serious about the health risks, launching a new campaign of stark visual warnings about tobacco's dangers.
Starting Aug. 1, cigarette labels in Egypt will be required to carry images of the effects of smoking: a dying man in an oxygen mask, a coughing child, and a limp cigarette symbolizing impotence.

It's a major step in Egypt's fledgling anti-smoking campaign and a dramatic change in a country where public discussion of smoking's health risks is nearly nonexistent.

"I would like to quit but I just can't. But when you see pictures like this, like that sick man, that has an effect — it does encourage you to stop," said Osama Sabri Mohammed, a 39-year-old civil servant, as he puffed on a cigarette outside a government building in downtown Cairo.
"This one specifically will have an effect on Egyptians, since they are really concerned about that," he said, when shown the image of the limp cigarette.

The photo of the limp cigarette comes with the warning that "long-term smoking has an effect on marital relations" — somewhat coyer than a version the European Union has recommended for its member countries, which states directly that smoking "causes impotence" and shows a discontented young married couple sitting apart in bed.

Twelve countries, including Canada, Jordan, Brazil and Thailand, require graphic photos of the effects of smoking to be printed on cigarette packs — and many have reported success in at least reminding smokers of the danger.
But the campaign faces a tough challenge among Egypt's die-hard smokers.

Egypt is one of the top 15 smoking countries in the world: Nearly 60 percent of all adult males in this country of 79 million people use tobacco in some form, compared to the United States where around 24 percent of men smoke cigarettes. An estimated 2 percent of Egyptian women smoke — though most researchers believe female smoking is greatly underreported due to social taboos against it that push female smoking into private areas.

In Egypt, ashtrays can be found everywhere from elevators to bathrooms. Passing around cigarettes or firing up a shisha, as the waterpipe is called here, is a must at every social occasion.
It's widespread even among those supposed to know better: Nearly a third of male health professionals smoke. 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.

"Egypt is an extraordinarily challenging country because it has such a culture of smoking, it's so ingrained in day-to-day living," said Gary Saffitz, the deputy director of Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Communication Programs, which is helping Egypt with the campaign.
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."

While anti-smoking campaigns have been in place for decades in the West, the issue has not even been on the agenda in Egypt. In the 1990s, when smoking in the developed world declined, it increased 8.6 percent in the Middle East, according to the American Cancer Society.

The first big step came in 2005, when Egypt ratified the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which lays out methods to combat tobacco use, including pictorial warning labels.
Since then, the first baby steps have been taken to ban smoking in some areas. Airports and Cairo's metro are strictly no-smoking, and a 2007 law banned smoking in government buildings — though enforcement is still an issue.

A month ago, the country's new tobacco control department was launched, though it consists of only two people in a closet-sized office with no telephones and an annual budget of just US$12,500.
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. Numerous studies, including a 2003 report by Tulane University researchers, have found that smoking can be a major cause of erectile disfunction, in part because it constricts veins and arteries, reducing blood flow.

"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.
There are many myths to overcome.

Some Egyptians are convinced only light cigarettes lead to impotence. 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 shopowners promptly started selling at a higher price.

And, as everywhere in the world, many smokers who realize it is bad still show scant interest in quitting.
"I've been smoking since I was eight years old — I used to pick up cigarette butts from the gutter and smoke them," laughed Hussein Hassan Mahmoud, a wizened 60-year-old butcher with one eye clouded from cataracts, sitting outside his Cairo shop enjoying a cigarette.

Mahmoud goes through three or four packs of the local Cleopatra cigarettes a day, at about US 50 cents a pack, and he scoffed when shown the new warnings.

"People will just tear the labels off," he said.

Comments

[cigarettes]

thanks for smking cigarettes dear egyptians