Salience and Impact of Health Warning Label on Cigarette Packs in Vietnam: Findings From the Global Adult Tobacco Survey 2015

ABSTRACT

Viet Nam is among the countries having highest rate of male smokers in the world. The country has joined the Global Tobacco Surveillance System since 2010. Under this system, two rounds of Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) were conducted in 2010 and 2015. Those two surveys provide excellent comparable data on tobacco usage and its related aspects in Vietnam. This study using the data from GATS 2015 to examine the salience and impact of cigarette pack health warnings on quitting intention in Vietnam. The Vietnam GATS 2015 was a nationally representative survey in which 9,513 households were selected using two-stage random systematic sampling method. Results of multivariate analysis showed that the strongest predictor for quit intention because of health warnings was “ever made a quit attempt in the past 12 months” followed by “believes that tobacco smoking causes serious illness”. Compared to GATS 2010, GATS 2015 observed the increase in salience of cigarette health warnings. However, the current pictorial health warnings are losing their impact on motivating intention to quit. The results highlight that it is time to start the rotation cycle to refresh the current health warning set. Actions to select a new and more impressive set of pictorial health warnings should be developed as soon as possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Global adult tobacco survey
• pictorial health warnings
• quit intention
• smoking
• vietnam

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.