Washington,U.S.A — Only months after the office of the U.S. Surgeon General warned that exposure to on-screen smoking causes young people to start smoking, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spotlighted the U.S. movie industry’s failure to protect young audiences.

Reversing a five-year decline in movie smoking, from 2005 to 2010, four out of the six major Hollywood studios featured more smoking in their youth-rated (G, PG and PG-13) movies in 2011. Overall, tobacco incidents per youth-rated film climbed by more than one-third above 2010; in 2011, youth-rated movies delivered almost twice as many tobacco impressions to domestic theater audiences as in 2010, topping 10 billion. The three major studios with published policies addressing onscreen smoking — Disney, Universal (Comcast) and Warner Bros. (Time Warner) — saw the sharpest increases in the number of tobacco incidents per youth-rated movie.

“These data show us that individual policies that movie studios created in good faith to address this important public health problem do not stand up,” said Cheryl G. Healton, DrPH, President and CEO of Legacy, a national public health organization dedicated to reducing the tobacco epidemic in the United States. “The only way to ensure a substantial and permanent reduction in young people’s exposure to on-screen smoking is for the movie industry to adopt a uniform set of policies that apply to all producers and distributors and provide structural incentives for lasting change,” Healton added.

The Legacy-funded study “Smoking in Top-Grossing US Movies in 2011″ published today in the CDC’s Preventing Chronic Disease found that the number of top-grossing, youth-rated movies that were tobacco-free dropped 17 percentage points from 2010 to 2011 among companies with policies, and the number of tobacco incidents in their movies climbed from an average of 1 in 2010 to 8.5 incidents per movie in 2011.

Across the industry, youth-rated movies accounted for 68 percent of all tobacco impressions delivered to theater audiences in 2011, compared to 39 percent in 2010. The review was conducted by Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! (TUTD), a project of Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails and the University of California, San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. (Tobacco impressions, an index of audience exposure, are estimated by multiplying the number of tobacco incidents in a film by paid admissions to the film)

“In 2011, the steady progress we had seen since 2005, led by three companies who each demonstrated that smoking in youth-rated movies could be all but eliminated, stopped and slipped backward. The stark difference in performance between those three major studios with policies and the three without all but disappeared last year,” said Stanton A. Glantz, Ph.D., Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of the report.

“The result of this increase in the amount of onscreen smoking will be thousands of more kids starting to smoke,” Glantz added. “That’s why only a uniform, industry-wide R rating policy for smoking will protect kids from exposure to tobacco imagery. It creates a sustainable, voluntary incentive for producers to leave smoking out of films produced to be marketed to kids.”

The problem of smoking in movies is a top public health priority, as the U.S. Surgeon General, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have emphasized the importance of reducing youth exposure to on-screen smoking.

“The industry knows what these policies are, because they have been recommended repeatedly by health agencies and organizations, civic bodies, youth groups, and, earlier this year, by more than three dozen state attorneys general: the R-rating for future smoking, certification of no tobacco payoffs, strong anti-tobacco spots before any movie with smoking, shown in any channel, and an end to tobacco brand display in movies,” Healton said.

“How many more movies will it take for Hollywood to get the big picture and stop recruiting kids for Big Tobacco?” Healton asked. “When an actor lights up, so does a child. It is time for the media companies and their movie studios to take real, lasting action on this issue.”

To learn more about Legacy’s life-saving programs, visit www.LegacyForHealth.org or follow them on Twitter @legacyforhealth and Facebook www.Facebook.com/Legacy.

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Wonder why your child’s classmate seems to be more absent than unusual and their seat is frequently empty in the classroom? Well, a new study finds children who live with smokers miss more school due to illness than those who live in households with non-smokers, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

Researchers found data from the 2005 National Health Interview Survey, which tracked how many days of school children ages 6 to 11 miss and the reason for their absence. (The study was not without limitations. Children over 12 were excluded from the study because of the possibility that exposure could be due to their own smoking).

The participants of that study were asked to evaluate each child’s general health and to answer the following questions: how many people smoked inside the home, how many school days the child missed due to illness or injury during the previous year, whether the child had three or more ear infections during the previous year, whether the child had a chest cold or gastrointestinal illness during the preceding two weeks and whether the child had been diagnosed with asthma, and if so, whether the child had any recent asthma attacks.

Of the 3,087 children whose information was analyzed for this study, more than 14 percent lived in a home with at least one person who smoked in the house, 8 percent lived with one household smoker and 6 percent with two or more, which represents 2.6 million children nationwide.

Children living with one in-home smoker had an average of 1.06 more days absent, and those living with two or more had 1.54 more days absent than did children living in homes where no one smoked indoors. The research also suggests that families could reduce absenteeism by 24 to 34 percent if smoking was eliminated from their households.

According to the study, about one third of children in the United States live with a smoker. Among children aged 3 to 11, at least 56 percent have detectable levels of a chemical called serum cotinine, which is an indication of tobacco smoke exposure. Cotinine is a breakdown of nicotine in the body and it can be measured by analyzing levels in the blood, urine or saliva.

Researchers like Dr. Douglas Levy, the study’s principal investigator and Assistant in Health Care Policy at the Mongan Institute for Health Policy, agrees this establishes a link between household smoking and two specific respiratory illnesses. But it seems missed school days and health issues are not the only effects of secondhand smoke for young children.

Researchers also calculated the potential costs associated with the need to care for children absent from school due to smoke-exposure related illness. Costs to the family include lost income for parents without paid time off, the costs to employers of the lost work, and the inability of caregivers not employed outside the home to take care of usual household tasks.

The total impact nationwide is $227 million in lost wages and household work for the families of the 2.6 million children living with smokers and for their employers. Overall secondhand smoke affects children’s education, health, and income.

Levy’s advice to parents? “If you are a smoker do not smoke around your kids whether it be at home or in the car. Even better advice is to try to quit smoking.”

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