Health Minister Nicola Roxon plans to encourage other countries to follow Australia's push for plain-packaged tobacco at a major United Nations summit on chronic diseases today.
Ms Roxon and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd will join dozens of heads of state at the UN General Assembly's two-day summit on the world's biggest killers - cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease - being held in New York.
With lifestyle factors such as smoking playing a key role in the rise in chronic disease, Australia's legal battle with the tobacco industry over plain cigarette packs has attracted headlines around the world ahead of the summit. Ms Roxon added that she hopes to share the government's challenges with the tobacco industry in trying to introduce laws for all cigarettes to be sold in drab olive-brown packs from mid-2012.
Fearing the old cigarette health warnings had lost their shock value, the Gillard government yesterday unveiled the stark new images it plans to slap on tobacco when plain packaging laws take effect next July. The new warnings will cover 75 per cent of the front of each pack - up from 30 per cent now.
Health Minister Nicola Roxon says the images are confronting. “'I think it's pretty gross,”' she said. “I think if I was a smoker, it would certainly put me off. I think if my partner was a smoker, it would encourage me to take extra efforts to get him to stop smoking.”
One ad warns that smoking causes bladder cancer and features a picture of a man with a urine-filled bag hanging from a hole in his abdomen. “Your body tries to remove the cancer-causing chemicals in tobacco smoke through your urine. This makes smoking a major cause of bladder cancer. Treatment may include removing your bladder and replacing it with a bag outside your body to collect your urine,” it says. Another describes dying slowly of suffocation from smoking-related emphysema. A skeletal, bald man lies on a hospital bed in a further image, his cheeks and ribs jutting painfully from an emaciated frame. It contrasts with a photo of a healthy young man a year earlier. “Bryan was a teenager when he started smoking. Like many others he never thought it would kill him. He died aged 34, just nine weeks after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He wanted others to know - 'this is what happens to you when you smoke',” the text reads.
A tiny premature baby lies on life support machinery in another image, alongside a warning that smoking in pregnancy can starve babies of vital nutrients in the womb - and can cause miscarriage or stillbirth.
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