If your cigarette box isn't disgusting, it's not doing its job
In South Africa, a small black box reads: 'Warning: Smoking kills.'
When warning signs are big, graphic and swapped out regularly, they help stop people smoking, according to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) latest Global Tobacco Epidemic report, which focuses on these types of warning signs and anti-tobacco marketing.
Yet, despite the WHO finding that South Africa — along with Lesotho — has the highest proportion of adults who smoke daily in Africa, our warnings are outdated. The regulations, last updated in 1995, require health warnings that cover 15% of the front of a cigarette pack, far below the WHO's recommendation of at least 50%.
Local cigarette packs have eight different warning texts, like 'Danger: Smoking causes cancer' and 'Warning: Don't smoke around children', but none show images. There are also no warning regulations for e-cigarette packaging, which often has fruity flavours wrapped in colourful pictures that target the youth, says Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, public health expert from the University of Pretoria and a member of the WHO's study group on tobacco product regulation.
'We don't have graphic warnings [which is a problem because] many people can't read the text that's only in English, and we don't enforce laws around advertisement, particularly for e-cigarettes.'
That will change if parliament passes the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, which would require all tobacco products (including e-cigarettes) to have plain packaging and a graphic warning that covers at least 65% of the front of packaging.
'Weak' text only warnings
The WHO recommends cigarette pack warnings as one of six ways to stop people from smoking, along with tracking tobacco use and raising taxes on it. These warnings should be graphic, in colour, cover at least half of the pack, alternate often to target different groups — such as pregnant women and the youth — and be printed in a country's main languages.
Picture warnings showing the harms of smoking, like blackened lungs or children in hospital beds, are harder to ignore than text warnings alone. That's because they keep people's attention, help develop negative emotions around cigarettes, like fear or disgust, and lessen the desire to start smoking or encourage quitting.
According to the WHO report, about 110 countries use cigarette graphic warnings, but 40 — including South Africa — still have 'weak' text-only labels or none at all.
Canada was the first to adopt graphic warnings in 2001, using images like rotten teeth and red eyes with texts like 'when you smoke it shows' to cover 50% of the front and back of cigarette packs. Nine months after their introduction, a survey of 432 smokers found that about one in five were smoking less.
Australia, which has been using graphic warnings since 2006, introduced plain packaging in 2012 to make health warnings work better and discourage smoking. Their cigarette packs also include health warnings and can't show branding apart from the product name. Combined with bans on public smoking and higher tobacco taxes, it has helped lower adult smoking.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
IOL News
a day ago
- IOL News
Honouring medical pioneers: Insights from UKZN's living legends panel
The University of KwaZulu-Natal's Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine this week hosted its annual 'On the Couch with Our Alumni Living Legends' panel discussion to honour four industry giants within the medical field. The living legends who were part of the panel were Dr Tshepo Motsepe who is South Africa's first lady, a physician, businesswoman, and patron of the Early Care Foundation; Professor Bilkish Cassim, an esteemed rheumatologist, academic and inaugural chair of geriatrics at UKZN; Dr Diliza Mji, founder, shareholder and director of the Busamed Group and Dr Warwick Morris, a renowned plastic and reconstructive surgeon with over five decades of service. The purpose of the gathering was to honour the alumni and teachers of the medical school. Mji said when he left medical school as a specialist to go into private practice, he felt intimidated about going into practice because, at the time, there wasn't an African person in Durban who was in private practice as a surgeon. "Forced to earn a living for my family, I was forced to go to Zimbabwe to look for a job, but when they offered me a salary, I said I'm coming back home. "Practice itself then led me to go into business because I then found certain things that were happening in private practice that I was not happy about. I said one day I will do it differently and that's how I started Busamed," said Mji. Motsepe said she grew up and went to school in a rural village. "In those years you would hear about diarrhea. My mum was a midwife in the village. We used to receive an injection because of TB. There were so many deaths from TB that we got to learn about as a child. "There were so many diseases. If we had proactive ways to prevent children from dying," said Motsepe. She said after completing her internship she went to Zimbabwe on holiday and stayed on for two years and worked. "There were so many tropical illnesses, preventable illnesses, malnutrition and stunting. I later learnt there was a course I could do on maternal child health. Even now that is where I do most of my work with creches. These are owned by female entrepreneurs. That is the area where we've had the most effect of making sure that the children are in a safe and secure environment," said Motsepe. When asked what personal sacrifices and moments of resilience had shaped her path, Motsepe said at the age of nine she had to go to a boarding school after attending the rural school. "My dad did not want us to be exposed to Bantu education. My dad wanted us to get a better education. Every year in January, he used to fly to Cape Town with a lawyer and apply for us to go to a coloured school in the Eastern Cape. This was a Catholic convent. "I went at the same time with my sister. We used to spend five months of the year away from home. There was a lot of homesickness. The first day when we arrived my sister and I didn't even know English and Afrikaans," she said. She said they were thrown into an environment where outside the classes they spoke Afrikaans and the education was done in English. "But we had to cope. So we used to leave home in January, come back in June for three weeks and then go back again to the boarding school and come back in December for six weeks. That's the life that one led throughout. My younger brother was six years old when he went to boarding school and it was all to avoid bantu education. Those were the most difficult years," she said. Cassim said she has been at the university's medical school for 50 years. "To say that all my 50 years here were happy is not true. I've had some existential crises both as far as my professional work has been concerned and as well as my health. I think the two of them were related. "But I think for me what has been important is firstly to believe in yourself. Secondly is to understand that bad things happen to good people and that you're not so special that nothing bad should ever happen to you and that if something does happen to you, you are seen not only not by what happened to you but how you reacted to it," she said. Morris, who graduated from medical school in 1964, retired after 60 years in March this year. He said his initial attraction was to be an obstetrician, but after a 40-minute lecture in plastic surgery, that aroused his interest. Morris spent years training and gaining experience in plastic surgery in South Africa, the US and England. He said aesthetic surgery is on patients who are not ill, don't have a disease, don't have a deformity, they just have some aspect of their appearance about which they're unhappy. "So my philosophy towards them, I would say to them, I like to call this happiness surgery. It's all about making happy patients." SUNDAY TRIBUNE
TimesLIVE
a day ago
- TimesLIVE
The journey from detection to protection: inside South Africa's hepatitis testing gaps
Egypt showed the world what's possible. Their national hepatitis C programme screened more than 60-million people and treated more than four million — all within five years. This was the result of a public health campaign that brought public and private partners together to inspire a nationwide commitment to eliminating the silent killer. South Africa has the tools, the partnerships and the healthcare workforce to do the same. So why haven't we? Part of the answer lies in awareness. In a recent survey, most South Africans said they didn't know hepatitis was a serious disease. Many had never been offered a test. The virus doesn't always present symptoms early, so it slips beneath the surface — undiagnosed, untreated and unspoken. But another part of the answer lies in how we design our health priorities. Testing for hepatitis still isn't fully integrated into existing services. For example, we've done critical work to normalise HIV testing — it's part of antenatal visits, school programmes, even workplace health drives. Hepatitis should be just as visible. It should be part of every antenatal screening, every STI check-up, every blood drive. Testing for one virus shouldn't mean ignoring others. There's also a missed opportunity in our corporate and community health environments. The burden of hepatitis doesn't stop at the clinic door. Chronic liver disease affects productivity, health budgets and family stability. While specific cost data is limited in South Africa, international evidence is clear: investing in integrated testing and early diagnosis reduces healthcare costs and improves lives. The World Health Organisation has set a goal: eliminate hepatitis as a public health threat by 2030. To get there, South Africa must do three things: Normalise integrated testing for hepatitis B and C. Expand public education to match the scale of the risk. Mobilise partnerships between government, private sector, and civil society to scale up access. Hepatitis isn't rare. It isn't untreatable. And it isn't too late. But every day we wait, we lose lives that could have been saved with a test. Let's not let silence stand in the way of protection. Let's make this the decade where South Africa turns detection into action — and action into health. Everyone deserves to get tested.
The Herald
2 days ago
- The Herald
Drowning rates in SA go up while global figures drop, says Lifesaving SA
Drownings in South Africa are increasing, bucking the global trend where the rates are dropping, Lifesaving South Africa (LSA) warned in a statement to mark World Drowning Prevention Day on Friday. 'While global drowning deaths have dropped by 38% over the past two decades, South Africa's rates are rising,' the federation said, adding the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated at least 2,700 drowning deaths a year, with children under five at the greatest risk. Africa has seen a 3% decline, while South Africa has struggled to deal with the threat. WHO statistics showed at least 1,600 drowning deaths a year in the country, but these figures did not include deaths from flooding disasters, LSA said. 'In South Africa the crisis is worsened by climate change and flooding disasters, such as those in the Eastern Cape in June, and preventable risks such as unsafe farm dams and canals, inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure and traditional baptism ceremonies at rivers and along coastline.'
