A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization
Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
| Home | Search | About ASH | Why Join | Comment | Email page |
|
Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
|
Smoking Rates on the Rise Among European Women [11/22-4]
Excerpts from: Across Europe, women are lighting up
By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune [11/22/04]
Even as smoking rates are declining among European males, they are rising dramatically among young women in many parts of Europe and the world, portending an epidemic of cancers and heart disease in the next decades if the trend is not reversed.
The statistics are particularly alarming in southern Europe and the former Eastern bloc, where few women smoked two decades ago, but where young women are now being specifically targeted by advertising.
For young women in Berlin, a lighted cigarette is almost as common an accessory as a watch: on display as they drive to work, sip wine in trendy bars or hang out with friends outside school.
Just off the Alexanderplatz, ads for organic supermarkets and toothpaste alternate incongruously with billboards featuring sexy women in business suits with smoke blowing from their lips. Here, cigarettes are a sign of liberation.
In Germany, half the women aged 15 to 30 smoke today, according to government surveys; in the former East Germany, the prevalence of smoking has gone up threefold among women since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
This a record for Europe, but the figures are alarming elsewhere as well. In Scotland, 24 percent of 15-year-old girls smoke, compared with 14 percent of boys that age. Smoking among teenage girls is on the rise in England, Belgium, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Finland. In fact, in virtually all European Union countries, teenage girls are more likely than boys to smoke, a World Health Organization survey found.
"What used to be seen as a male habit is now common in both sexes, and more girls are starting than boys," said Dr. Amanda Amos, a professor of health promotion at the University of Edinburgh. And once they start, scientific studies have repeatedly shown, women have a far harder time breaking the habit than men.
Though smoking generally takes a decade or two to produce serious disease, rates of lung cancer in women are already starting to surge throughout Europe, "in both younger and older women and in almost all countries," according to a study this year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon.
Lung cancer has recently overtaken breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer deaths among women in Scotland.
More than 100 women die a day in Germany as a direct result of smoking, according to the International Network of Women Against Tobacco, a U.S-based group with members in 70 countries opposed to tobacco use among women.
"The trends with women smoking are going up, not down," said Dr. Martina Pötschke-Langer, head of the cancer prevention unit at the University of Heidelberg's Cancer Center. "The tobacco industry has focused its advertising campaigns on the young, especially girls and women."
Cigarette companies deny that they specifically target young people or girls, saying that their advertising is designed only to help adult smokers choose a brand.
The worsening smoking rates in girls and women stand in stark contrast to rates among males, which have decreased steadily in most European countries for the past 10 years. Although more men than women still smoke across Europe, that balance is starting to change.
In Sweden, where smoking among men has decreased nearly 46 percent since 1985, there are now more women than men who smoke, according to WHO statistics. Nearly equal percentages of men and women now smoke in England and Ireland.
In Greece, more men than women still smoke. But where smoking rates among men have decreased 5 percent in the past 20 years, rates among women have nearly doubled.
In Berlin, many women said they felt women tended to smoke more than men. "I don't know any woman who doesn't smoke," said Sevdag Galleski, 38, wrapped in an elegant long gray coat as she took a cigarette break with a small crowd of shivering co-workers on the tree-lined central concourse of Unter den Linden. Her employer, a large multinational, forbids its workers to smoke on the sidewalk outside its headquarters on the most glamorous thoroughfare of old East Berlin.
The contrast between male and female smoking habits is particularly striking in some of the former Eastern bloc countries, and among less well-educated women. In Hungary, between 1995 and 2003, smoking rates among men declined to 42 percent from 49 percent; among women, they rose to 29 percent from 22 percent.
For many youths in these countries, experts said, smoking is connected with a touch of post-Communist nihilism as well as the desire to emulate what they perceive to be cool in the West.
In Germany's hip Prinz magazine, advertisements for cigarettes are mixed with ads for skis, fast cars and Armani cologne. One proclaims that Pall Mall cigarettes are "New York's taste," displaying a New York street scene with a yellow taxi and a bus - without mentioning that smoke-free New York is today a smoker's worst nightmare.
Outside Berlin's State Opera House, in the city's east, a cluster of girls in red vests who were about to begin their shifts as attendants sent a cloud of smoke over their heads. "To me it's no problem - I like smoking and I'm not really concerned about the effects," said Thea Rossler, 23.
Smoking has been linked to a wide range of illnesses, from cancer to heart disease. The clearest tie is to lung cancer, but cervical and ovarian cancer have been associated with smoking as well. Although cigarette companies have tried to promote "light" cigarettes to women, scientists have concluded that these brands are just as addictive and dangerous to health as conventional varieties.
But Germany is not likely to follow soon. While the European Union has sought to impose a ban on tobacco advertising in all of its member states, Germany has protested that decision. Cigarette taxes, and therefore prices, remain low in Germany compared with other EU states. The price of a pack of cigarettes is just over €3 in Germany, compared with more than €5 in Italy and France.
Pötschke-Langer said tobacco companies had been host to promotional activities to attract young girls, sponsoring movies, for example, or giving away free cosmetics along with cigarettes. German schools have accepted donations of computers from tobacco companies.
| Home Web Page | Search This Site | Learn About ASH | Why Join ASH | Comment on This | Email This Page |