Consistent health and lifestyle education focusing on the effects of smoking needs to be initiated and aimed at people as young as eight and nine years of age, according to an oncologist, Dr Des Carney, of the Mater Hospital, Dublin. This was necessary, he said, in light of evidence of increased smoking among young people, particularly girls. It was also in response to indications that up to 50 per cent of people in the 10-to-12 age-bracket are smoking. The most important strategy was to prevent them from starting. There were many reasons why they started, including peer pressure, going against their parents and image. It was only in the 17-to-20 age bracket that they were prepared to begin acknowledging the "bad things" associated with smoking.
It was hard for young people to project ahead even if they were told they risked getting lung cancer at 65. The biggest message was to smoke, delivered by tobacco companies targeting young people and reflected in American advertising suggesting that the Marlboro man is macho, and the Virginia Slims girl thin.
Ireland with Britain and the US has the highest proportion of young female smokers. The reason for this, Dr Carney said, had yet to be fully established but he believed it was "something to do with image" and the perception that it could keep their weight down.
Young women were, nonetheless, responsive to indications that smoking could reduce their fertility and the size of their babies. The message was all the more important because of evidence that the younger they started smoking, the more susceptible they were to lung cancer.
