Children exposed to the ads are more likely to try vaping
CDC’s new report shows that too many teens are being exposed to e-cigarettes ads. With 70 percent of high school and middle school students exposed to the ads, e-cigarettes became the most popular form of tobacco among teenagers.
According to the U.S. Youth Tobacco Survey 71 percent of high school students and 66 percent of middle school students have seen at least one ad of e-cigarettes during 2014. Materials promoting e-cigarettes are being exposed in magazines, newspapers, online, in stores, at the TV and even at the cinema. About 18.3 million teenagers are exposed to e-cigarettes advertisements in the United States.
In the period between 2011 and 2014 money spent on the promotion of e-cigarettes increased from $6.4 million to $115 million. During the same period the rate of middle school students who reported they have been vaping has also increased from 0.6 percent to 3.9 percent. Among the high school students the figures are even more telling as the vapers’ rates rose from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 13.4 percent in 2014.
According to the director of the CDC, Dr. Tom Frieden, there is certainly a connection between the rose of ads spending and that of e-cigarettes use. Frieden compared this strategy of exposing children to e-cigarettes ads to the one used by tobacco companies decades ago to make millions of teenagers addicted to nicotine.
The study has been published in CDC’s Weekly Report Morbidity and Mortality but the authors did not make such a bold statement as the CDC’s director, saying only that there might be a connection between the two factors.
Authors of the study have analyzed responses from 22,007 students in high school and middle school from both public and private schools. The results showed that 55 percent of the children have seen e-cigarettes ads in retail stores, 40 percent saw the ads online, 37 percent saw them on TV and in movies and 30 percent in newspapers or magazines.
The majority of the respondents have been exposed to the ads in more than one place. While only 22 percent have seen the ads in only one place, 15 percent saw them in all the four places, 14 percent in three places and 17 percent in two places.
However, the study did not include ads on billboards, at events or other places so more children might have been exposed to e-cigarettes adds than the study found.
A study published in 2015 in the Journal of Preventive Medicine revealed that 43 percent of the teens who saw e-cigarettes commercials on TV were more likely to be curious to try them.
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