New anti-smoking campaign concentrates on rot

Public Health England (PHE) yesterday launched a new campaign to highlight how ‘smoking damages the body and causes a slow and steady decline in a process similar to rotting’, according to a GOV.UK press note.

The note said the campaign was starting as a new expert review commissioned by PHE had highlighted the multiple impacts that toxic ingredients in cigarettes could have on the human body.

While many smokers knew that smoking caused cancer and harmed the lungs and heart, the new report highlighted how it damaged also: bones and muscles; the brain; teeth; and eyes.

The campaign is said to tackle also some common misconceptions around hand-rolled tobacco.

The consumption of hand-rolled cigarettes had increased significantly, the note said. In 1990, 18 percent of male smokers and two percent of female smokers said they smoked mainly hand-rolled cigarettes, but by 2013 these figures had risen to 40 percent for men and 23 percent for women.

New figures showed that 49 percent of smokers who only smoked hand-rolled cigarettes wrongly believed these products were less harmful than were manufactured cigarettes. ‘In fact, hand-rolled cigarettes are at least as hazardous as any other type of cigarette,’ the note said.

Digital and print billboards will show a hand-rolled cigarette full of decaying tissue, while an online viral will see a father casually rolling a cigarette formed of rotting human flesh.

These images are supposed to demonstrate that ‘every cigarette rots you from the inside out’.

The full press note is at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/stop-the-rot-new-campaign-highlights-how-cigarettes-rot-the-body-from-the-inside.