The Awareness, Perceptions and Attitudes towards health warnings on cigarette packages in Northern Cyprus: a community-based descriptive study

Abstract

Background: Health warnings displayed on tobacco products are important sources of health information for the community. Aims: The aim of this study was to determine the awareness, perceptions and attitudes towards the impact of health warnings on cigarette packages of a community in Nicosia, where no previous data was available. Methods: The descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 629 cafe attendants in Nicosia in October 2019, using a structured questionnaire to determine the impact of pictorial and text-only cigarette pack warnings. Since cigarette packs include only text-only warnings in Northern Cyprus, sample pictorial warnings from Turkey were presented to the participants.The data were analysed by IBM–SPSS-18.0 to compare perceptions regarding sex, age, smoking status with significance level accepted as p<0.05. Results: Of all the participants, 48%were smokers and smokers among men were significantly higher (56.8%) than women (40.6%). The results demonstrated that 71.2% of the participants were aware of the health warnings on packages and 59.4% rated health warnings as effective. Stronger pictorial health warnings were deemed as more effective. However, 65.6% of the “smoker” group were not aware of the warnings.There were significant differences between smokers and non-smokers regarding perceptions of pictorial warnings. Non-smokers, including former smokers adopted positive views more; 54% of ex-smokers declared health warnings had contributed to their quitting process. Conclusion: The perceptions of the non-smokers of this community group displayed more positive attitudes towards health warnings. This study has pointed to the urgent need for the implementation of pictorial warnings for smokers in Northern Cyprus.