In a bid to check the increasing use of tobacco, traditional and modern cigarettes among the Americans especially the teens, the government is going to launch a major new anti-tobacco campaign in the United States next week.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is going to launch $115 million campaign to target the 10 million youths in their age group 12 to 17 who are opening themselves to try cigarettes or who are already experimenting with them.
The first campaign has been named “The Real Cost”. It will be launched on February 11.
It’s an initiative to check the youths who are in danger of becoming regular smokers or are turning towards cigarettes. It will also target those who need proper counseling to give up their smoking habit, the FDA said.
There are many awareness programs scheduled over the next two years and this campaign is the first among them. These programs aim to target rural, gay, African American and American Indian youths who are at risk.
At a media briefing on Monday, Mitch Zeller, head of the FDA’s tobacco products division, said that the goal of the awareness campaigns is to reduce the number of young smokers by at least 300,000 within three years.
Even if the government is leaving no stone unturned to check the use of cigarettes and tobacco products, cigarette smoking is getting more hazardous today than they actually were five decades ago. A newly released US Surgeon General’s report shows smoking is leading towards more diseases, killing more and more people and imposing more burden to economy in the United States than 50 years ago.
According to a government report, smoking is killing around 480,000 Americans each year. One out of every five deaths in the US is due to cigarette smoking.
