Research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Research - Essay Example Based on the data from World health organization cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use kill more than 4 million people worldwide every year, with about 1.25 billion active smokers worldwide. With the same trends of tobacco use it is estimated that tobacco smoking will kill 8.4 million people a year by year 2020 (WHO 2000). Now even though these numbers are alarming the advertising of tobacco smoking is increasing in volume and specificity. It is estimated that in year 2006 in United States, the 5 largest tobacco companies spend 12.50 billion dollars on advertising, or more accurately more that 34 million dollar per day in advertising and promoting cigarette smoking. What is most important is that the as the cigarette smoking declines, the amount of money spend on advertising is drastically increasing (Slater et al 2007). Also some new price strategies that are designed by the tobacco companies, like price discounts that are paid to wholesaler and large distributors to lowe r the price of the cigarettes, actually lead to increased number of smokers among youth and adolescents in United States (Federal Trade Commission 2006). The advertising in tobacco industry goes as far as designing cigarettes that are specially attractive and appealing to women, where the targeting of women as smokers goes beyond marketing because the companies try to find specific factors of motivation, patterns of social activities associated with smoking, specific product preferences etc. in order to produce gender or age specific products (Carpenter et al 2005). As we can see the tobacco industry is a strong factor that is promoting the use of tobacco neglecting the negative effects of smoking in the process. Since tobacco smoking is a major health problem, the health system has very important role in promoting the negative effect of smoking and its participants: doctors, nurses, public health workers and other medical personnel. As stated by World health organization the public health community and health professionals should lead the way in solving the problem of tobacco use (WHO 2000). The role of health professionals is important because there are studies that show that the chances of smoking cessation increases after a patient receives advice from a health care professional (Fiore et al. 2000). There are many programs in the world designed to reduce the incidence tobacco use among physicians and other health care professionals around the world. There are information’s that indicate that maximum 10 percents of physicians in Australia, Norway, Canada, United States, United Kingdom and other developed countries smoke tobacco. This incidence is much higher among the countries in Europe. As opposite of this up to 40 percent or more of the physicians smoke in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and other countries in Europe (WHO 1993). This is interesting because the study conducted by Emanuela and Anna 2009 also showed that incidence of tobacco use