Health education - Still smoking after all these deaths

It is terribly dispiriting that almost one-in-three Irish women still smoke.

That this grim-reaper statistic stands despite decades of preventative health education programmes, millions upon millions spent on anti-smoking advertising, the sobering fact that one-in-two smokers will die of a smoking-related illness, and that nearly everyone of us has seen a life sucked away or squandered through tobacco addiction.

So many Irish women smoke that for the first time, more women are dying from lung cancer than from breast cancer. It is not sanctimonious to suggest that this is a huge social failure because so many of these women, no matter how much they enjoy the great pleasures of smoking, must know that they will pay the ultimate price for their indulgence. As well as that, they will add tremendously to the strain placed on an already overstretched health system.

Most of all, it is a sobering testimony to the power of advertising and product placement to persuade consumers that the pleasure, ultimately the slavish necessity, of smoking outweighs the-all-but inevitable lethal consequences.

Yesterday, the Irish Cancer Society warned that the tobacco industry is aggressively targeting women and girls. This is not surprising, after all tobacco peddlers are commercial beasts dedicated to realising a profit who will use any legal means that serve this end. If that includes packaging and re-branding to seduce women, we should not be surprised. However, we should be disappointed that these campaigns are so very successful. It is terribly disappointing that all of the health programmes designed to make smoking socially unacceptable because it is so very dangerous, have not been more effective.

The figures make grim reading especially as they seem so loaded against those in disadvantaged areas, most especially young women. Statistics reveal that 29% of the population smokes, 27% of women do but the figure jumps to 41% in disadvantaged areas. The rate among young women in disadvantaged areas is a staggering and disheartening 56%. As ever, poverty and the lack of education take the greatest toll of all. Some way of breaking this cycle must be found but, as in all of these challenges, personal responsibility is the best foil to those industries that put profits before their customers’ health.

In another skirmish between food producers and health advocates yesterday, Health Minister Dr James Reilly supported a Food Safety Authority of Ireland call for labelling showing the calorie content of meals and portions sold in restaurants. He gave businesses six months to introduce calorie checks on a voluntary basis or possibly face a compulsory scheme. Though this reeks of nanny-state, the obesity epidemic and the proliferation of fast food outlets, one of the great curses of our age, makes this intervention unavoidable.

Moves to make smoking and overly fat fast foods less attractive are laudable but focus on a section of the population that has chosen to ignore irrefutable health data. If the minister were to focus his efforts on clearer, more readily interpreted food labelling in supermarkets, he might find a more receptive audience and contribute at least as much to the health of the nation.