Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:22pm EST
(Reuters) – Cigarette smoking among American teenagers forsaken to a record low in 2012, a decrease that might have been partly driven by a pointy travel in a sovereign tobacco tax, researchers pronounced on Wednesday.
An annual consult of about 45,000 students in a eighth, 10th and 12th grades found that a altogether suit of those observant they had smoked in a before 30 days fell by only over a commission indicate to 10.6 percent.
“A one commission indicate decrease might not sound like a lot, though it represents about a 9 percent rebate in a singular year in a series of teenagers now smoking,” Lloyd Johnston, a principal questioner in a study, pronounced in a statement.
He pronounced reductions on that scale can interpret into a impediment of thousands of beforehand deaths and tens of thousands of cases of cancer and other critical disease.
More than 400,000 Americans are estimated to die betimes any year as a outcome of cigarette smoking – a No. 1 means of preventable U.S. deaths – and many smokers start their robe as adolescents, experts say.
Healthcare advocates hailed Wednesday’s commentary as justification that aloft cigarette taxes were profitable off, total with sovereign curbs on youth-oriented tobacco selling and sales and a unconditional anti-smoking media campaign.
The researchers also cited a boost in sovereign cigarette taxes, lifted by 62 cents a container in 2009, as a expected contributing factor. The commentary were partial of an annual consult by University of Michigan researchers expelled by a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Smoking rates fell for any of a particular age groups surveyed, many particularly among eighth graders – from 6.1 percent in 2011 to 4.9 percent in 2012, a consult found.
Longer-term trends showed teen smoking rates dropping by about three-fourths among eighth graders, two-thirds among 10th graders and by half among 12th graders given a rise in a mid-1990s, researchers said.
One reason cited by experts is that a suit of students who have ever attempted smoking has declined sharply. Whereas scarcely half of all eighth graders had attempted cigarettes in 1996, only 16 percent had finished so this year.
Teen attitudes toward smoking also continued to turn some-more negative. For example, 80 percent of teenagers pronounced they elite to date nonsmokers in 2012.
But anti-tobacco advocates pronounced their conflict to stamp out teen smoking was distant from over, observant that 17 percent of high propagandize seniors still connoisseur as smokers.
Researchers singled out concerns over new forms of smokeless tobacco, including dissolvable products like Camel-branded “Orbs” and “Strips,” and a fine, wet form of tinge called snus (rhymes with “loose”), that users place underneath their top lip.
They pronounced a poignant apportionment of comparison teenagers have experimented with tiny cigars and H2O pipes called hookahs, that are apropos renouned among immature adults.
“We can’t let a ensure down when a tobacco attention still spends $8.5 billion a year – scarcely $1 million ever hour – to marketplace a lethal and addictive products and is pulling new products … that tempt youth,” pronounced Susan Liss, executive executive for a Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Stacey Joyce)
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