When was the warning label put on cigarettes

Packaging establishes brand imagery that is often completely opposite to the realities and dangers associated with tobacco product use. Control over tobacco packaging is critical to tobacco control efforts. Tobacco packs can effectively broadcast messages about the harmful impact of tobacco use. Health warnings have long appeared on cigarette packages but are far from adequate today to inform people about the health harms of cigarette smoking. These warnings first appeared on cigarette packages in and were most recently updated in As described in detail in the proposed rule, FDA went through a lengthy process to develop and test the text statements and accompanying color images to ensure the proposed warnings would promote greater public understanding of the negative health consequences of smoking.

Historically, public health messages about the risks from cigarette smoking, including longstanding warnings on cigarette packages and in advertisements, have focused on a limited number of health conditions such as lung cancer and addiction.

And over time, public understanding of these health consequences has improved. However, FDA identified a great potential to educate the public about health conditions that are less known and less understood by the public to be caused by smoking. The public has a limited understanding of smoking-related health consequences such as impotence; stroke; gangrene; conditions that cause blindness, such as cataracts; emphysema and chronic bronchitis; bladder cancer and other cancers besides lung cancer; and the effects of secondhand smoke on nonsmoking adults and children.

And they also cause a number of less-known smoking-related risks that youth and adult smokers and nonsmokers may simply not be aware are connected with tobacco products, such as diabetes, blindness, and erectile dysfunction. These health harms are among a long list of the negative health effects of cigarette smoking.

FDA conducted its own extensive research to develop and test revised warning statements about the risks associated with cigarette smoking that were developed to focus on these less-known health consequences of smoking. Phillips, A. Gentzke, et al. Hammond, D. Health warning messages on tobacco products: a review. Tobacco control, 20 5 , Wakefield, M. The cigarette pack as image: new evidence from tobacco industry documents.

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