Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Tobacco companies vary pack colours, designs, descriptors, flavours and brand names on cigarette packs to target a multitude of consumers. These different brand variants can falsely imply that some brand variants are less harmful than others. Uruguay is the only country that requires cigarette companies to adhere to a single presentation (one brand variant) per brand family.
Methods An existing, systematic pack purchasing protocol was adapted for data collection. Neighbourhoods in Montevideo were categorised into five strata by percentage of poor households. Five neighbourhoods within each stratum were selected based on geographical variation. In each neighbourhood, a ‘starting hub’ was identified and a systematic walking protocol was implemented to purchase unique packs at four key vendor types.
Results Unique packs were purchased in 9 out of 25 neighbourhoods. Fifty-six unique packs were purchased, representing 30 brands. Of these, 51 packs were legal, representing 26 brands. The majority of the legal brands (n=16; 62%) were compliant with the requirement. The remaining packs were non-compliant due to differences in colour, design element, brand name, crest and descriptors. Although not prohibited by the single presentation requirement, 16 legal brands had more than one stick count (10, 11, 14 or 20 sticks), and packs from four brands had more than one packaging type (hard, soft or tin).
Conclusion Overall, compliance with Uruguay’s single presentation requirement was good. In addition to the current restrictions, future single presentation requirements could expand to include packs in more than one stick count and packaging type.
- (MeSH): Public Policy
- Low/Middle Income Country
- Packaging and Labelling
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Footnotes
Funding TD is responsible for the data collection, analysis and write-up of this brief report. This report is a shortened version of her MPH capstone under the direction of her capstone supervisor and PI of the pilot study, JEC.
Funding JEC holds the Bloomberg Professorship of Disease Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; the earnings from that endowment helped to support this work.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.