Jump to full article: Reuters, 2008-06-26
Author: Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Intro: Efforts to reduce teen smoking have stalled in the past five years as states lose funding for anti-tobacco efforts and as companies use new strategies to recruit customers, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.
While fewer youths are trying cigarettes for the first time, overall smoking rates stayed stable at just under 22 percent for students aged 14 to 18 between 2003 and 2007, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
Many fewer students have ever tried a cigarette -- just 50 percent, down from 70 percent in 1999. But CDC officials were not celebrating this number.
"We had seen this great progress from 1999 to 2003 and we were turning around this epidemic of increase in the 1990s that had everybody concerned," Terry Pechacek of CDC's Office on Smoking and Health said in a telephone interview.
"Unfortunately, that progress has not been maintained."
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