Appraisal of the effectiveness of pictorial warning in anti-tobacco campaign: a community based study from Davangere, Karnataka India

Global studies from around the world have shown that tobacco is a leading preventable cause of death, killing nearly six million people worldwide each year of which nearly one sixth are from India. Informing about the harm of tobacco use through large and colorful pictorial warnings on tobacco products are an effective way of communicating the deleterious effects of tobacco to the consumers and general public. India has introduced the pictorial health warnings for the first time in 2009 with the drawings of a scorpion on smokeless forms of tobacco and pictures and Xrays of diseased lungs for smoking forms. The study was conducted using a structured questionnaire in the months of October to November 2010 in Davangere of India with both smokeless and smoke form users at the point of vendor sale. The results indicated that the pictorial warnings, especially the ones present on the smoking forms were not effective and did no not serve the desired purpose as the consumers could not comprehend the meaning of the picture. The scorpion becomes associated with the product in a nonscientific manner. In conclusion, in our study we observed that most of the tobacco consumers have seen pictorial warnings on tobacco products, but hardly few of them have comprehended the pictorial warnings correctly. The present pictorial warnings were able to motivate very few tobacco consumers to quit/reduce tobacco consumption. Therefore the impact factor was very less among tobacco consumers and that an urgent need for reconsideration for more effective pictorial warnings is required.