Posted on 11/19/2001 6:57:07 PM PST by Max McGarrity
Edited on 04/13/2004 3:36:01 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Tom Koehler thought he had a ready partner last year when he applied for a grant to help thousands of union workers quit smoking.
Koehler and two colleagues approached the Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco (MPAAT), which was created to help smokers stop. The group saw the estimated 174,000 smokers among Minnesota union members as prime targets for its efforts. MPAAT said no.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Off to part II.
sorry my friend - it is way late and I have not read the entire article - but the first 6 graphs are proof enough.
You have my word I will read it in its entirety in the morning and comment thusly!!!!
BTW - Goodnight - I'll deal with this in the morning!!!!!!
You were probably busy reading while I was dusting off the old "flag list." You get some rest; you'll need it to ward off the hissies after reading this mess. Hehehe.
don't go doing a disappearing act on me tomorrow - I realize the time difference, however.................
It makes one wonder what the results were. I think the second hand smoke theory is bunkum, and governments know it.
Until you get back into the habit of checking the "puff_list."
Maybe I can associate checking the puff_list with opening a new pack of smokes.
The tobacco settlement monies were supposed to be for states to recover the cost of health care for smokers. Since it was our tax money in the first place it should have been returned to us.
The $223,000 survey was intended to measure Minnesota adults' attitudes toward smoking and establish a baseline by which to measure future progress. It was commissioned, conducted, completed, analyzed, found to be viable -- and never released, or even presented to the board.
Now why do you suppose that is? Is it possible that it actually found that the state was split?
This focus on secondhand smoke de-emphasized the importance of individual cessation efforts, even though they were the focus of the court order establishing MPAAT.
Sounds like the old bait and switch technique to me.
''They have become so pure in ideology that they are arrogant, and they have forgotten their mission,'' Hatch said in an interview. ''Try to get people to stop smoking; don't force people. Zealotry is bad no matter what the issue is.''
This is the anti-smokers' problem. They have forgotten that 25% od adults in the USA smoke. Either that or they just DON'T CARE.
When the board decided to act, it adopted a strategy not championed by its own advisory committees, which were later disbanded.
Hear that, the board didn't like hearing the truth so they ignored it and then killed the messenger. Coming to a town near you.
Judy Knapp is a Wisconsin native who grew up in a house with two smoking parents. Some 20 years later, she still worries about the effects of that secondhand smoke on her health.
Notice that it doesn't say she HAS any health problems, just that she worries about it.
So, in a nutshell the state created a monster, let it loose, and now can't seem to control it.
The great tobacco settlement at work.
The American people should never be allowed to forget two people as prime movers for these hidden taxes and fees:
Al Gore for his part in the Tele-Communications Bill and subsequently getting his friends installed in the new FCC bureauacracy created to administer the program. And,
John McCain for being a driving force in the Senate in pushing the Tobacco Bill.
Of course it is, and of course they do. Speaking of Australia, Simon Chapman is one of the leading anti-smoker voices there and here is an actual fax showing just how much he should be trusted. I believe this is originally from FORCES.
For over 50 years, the news media have informed, educated and sometimes confused millions of people about the dangers of smoking. By reporting on each new twist and development in the unfolding saga, the media have kept the story alive and through repetition helped change public perceptions about tobacco. Simon Chapman reminds us of the vital role of media advocacy in tobacco control especially in low resource countries.
When most people think of "using the media in health promotion", they think of specific mass media campaigns run by governments or non government agencies such as the outstanding Florida "Truth" campaign. In 1997, the British Medical Journal published a systematic review of 14 large community risk factor intervention trials to prevent heart disease. Together these involved over 1.2 million people. The review concluded "The pooled effects of multiple risk factor intervention on mortality were insignificant … Changes in risk factors were modest … The evidence suggests that such interventions implemented through standard health education methods have limited use in the general population. Health protection through fiscal and legislative measures may be more effective." [1]
The data showed that many in the intervention groups had improved their coronary risk factors. But so had those in the control groups - hence there was no extra benefit of often quite intensive health promotion interventions over the background influences that have been driving down smoking, and improving diet and exercise rates.
So what - in 14 different communities around the world - was causing significant numbers in the control populations -- who had not been subject to these programs -- to improve their risk factors? The answer is newsmaking and advocacy about health.
My plea can be summarised very simply: Let's bring the background into the foreground" in understanding how the health of populations change. Let us pay far more attention to what it is that is influencing what researchers call the reference population, and ordinary people call the general population. Let's stop pretending that health promotion in the media consists mostly of paid, highly researched and targeted communications that run for a few weeks here and there. Let us recognise that there is already impressive evidence that strategically planned efforts to make health promotion issues newsworthy can result in vast exposure of such messages to sometimes billions of people all around the globe; that these efforts can work in much the same way that paid health promotion advertising works; and that making news as opposed to running advertisements carries many communicative advantages.
Let us particularly remember that making news through media advocacy is virtually cost free: it allows advocates operating on shoe-string budgets to be as influential as central government agencies with million dollar communication budgets. It allows all of us attending conferences like this to feel that we can be participants instead of just awe-inspired but often disempowered spectators on efforts to contribute to the communicative environment about public health issues.
Health promotion media campaigns have become almost fetish objects in our field: it's as if health promotion agencies feel naked without an advertising-based media campaign. Enormous effort goes into lobbying to acquire the money to run them, into the creative process that produces them and into evaluating whether they were seen, remembered or made a difference. They are often given awards for advertising excellence. And let me emphasise that there is a good deal of evidence that they can be highly successful in achieving their various goals.
Those running them often have not only the money to mount them, but significant evaluation research budgets that privilege the way our field comes to conceptualise the overall public health enterprise: we pay huge attention to the influence of certain interventions, but largely ignore the effects of others which don't bring their own evaluation budgets with them. We might as well be saying "if you aren't counting it, it doesn't count"
Aside from several US states like California, Massachusetts and Florida which are swimming in campaign money arising from the US tobacco settlement, there are few nations anywhere on earth where public awareness health campaigns last for more than a few weeks a year at most. In tobacco control for example, most countries have a short burst of publicity around World No Tobacco day, and that's about it. Add to this local town campaigns run through the radio station or newspaper, and you have a pretty modest enterprise.
In the cases of Australia, the UK, and the United States, the fall in tobacco use commenced in the early 1960s after massive rises in the from the 1940s and before. These falls were not caused by health education campaigns - which didn't exist in today's terms -- but by the massive news coverage generated by reports like those of the Royal College of Physicians and the US Surgeon General in the early 1960s. The world's first pack warnings did not appear until 1967, and mass reach tobacco control campaigns as we know them today did not commence in Australia until the early 1980s.
For the last 20 years or so in nations where health promotion efforts have grown rapidly, the effort to disentangle the precise impact of discrete interventions on changes in health outcomes subject to multiple policy and program attention has become like trying to separate the egg from the omlette. For example, the communicative environment about smoking in Australia today features occasional bursts of national campaign advertising; large scale direct to consumer advertising competition by the two pharmaceutical companies fighting for market share of the nicotine replacement market; and relentless, daily news coverage and debate generated by local advocates, national and international news.
In 1999 there were 8,738 separate radio, television and newspaper reports on tobacco published and broadcast in Australia. With an average of 24 items a day, there was seldom a day throughout the year when smoking wasn't being discussed in the news and news commentary media. As the tobacco industry has noted, the great majority of these items are overtly or implicitly anti-smoking in their orientation. Such widespread and continuing exposure to anti-smoking news and discussion stimulate uncountable family, workplace and social discussions, which in turn would precipitate many quitting attempts.
1. Ebrahim S, Smith GD. Systematic review of randomised controlled trials of multiple risk factor interventions for preventing coronary heart disease. BMJ 1997;314:1666
Dr. Simon Chapman, University of Sydney.
In the next issue of INGCAT Update look for hints and tips for generating news coverage.
I think I'll just go right to the vitriol.
The Anti-Smoking Talibans are the people I've instinctively hated all my life. Tax-tics, incurable narcissistic neurotics, cowards in a foxhole, ultra-pecksniffs, predictable intellectual round-pounders, emotional dead-enders, the perpetual hall monitors of life.
Name calling helps me when I'm in a really grouchy mood. Sorry. Not very thoughtful, but very cathartic.
Fiscal Responsibility in action.
The tobacco settlement was a payoff to the Trial Lawyer's Association and the ABA for their support of Clinton, and a way to punish the tobacco companies for supporting Republicans. Period.
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