A 1970s law in Finland that restricted smoking in public places and banned tobacco advertising appears to have helped curb the country’s smoking habit and reduce the incidence of disease, new research reports.

Researchers from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki found that after the Tobacco Act passed in Finland in 1976, the rate of smoking dropped. And when smoking decreased, so did the rate of lung cancer and respiratory diseases.

“The Tobacco Act has been very effective,” study author Dr. Kari Reijula told Reuters Health. “The incidence of lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases has started to decrease due to the tobacco legislation.”

In response to an increase in smoking-related diseases in the 1960s and 1970s, the Finnish government took legislative steps that banned all tobacco advertising, restricted public smoking, prohibited the sale of tobacco to minors, added health warnings to smoking packages, and used a portion of the tobacco tax revenue for smoking prevention.

To investigate whether these measures had any effect on smoking habits nationwide, the researchers reviewed smoking rates from 1960 and 2000, as well as the incidence of diseases linked to tobacco.

According to the report, the rate of smoking among men fell from 58 percent to 28 percent between 1960 and 2000. After 1971, the rate of lung cancer among men dropped from 80 cases per 100,000 men to 32 cases per 100,000 men. Likewise, death rates from respiratory disease also fell during the study period.

Among women, the rate of smoking increased to 20 percent up to 1973. After the Tobacco Act, smoking among women leveled off and then declined slightly, but inched back to 20 percent after 1985. Although the rate of lung cancer among women increased since the beginning of the study, it increased at a slower rate after the Tobacco Act, the authors report in the journal Chest.

Reijula said the Tobacco Act was renewed in 1995, when the government added a stipulation that encouraged many large businesses to ban indoor smoking. The most recent revision in 2000 labeled tobacco smoke a carcinogen and required restaurants to reserve less than half their space for smokers.

“In Finland, we are totally convinced that the legislation is the most powerful and effective tool to change the situation in workplaces concerning exposure to tobacco smoke,” Reijula said.

Based on these results, Reijula said the most effective components of the Tobacco Act were likely the ban on smoking in public places, the hike in tobacco taxes, the prohibiting of the sale of tobacco to minors.

SOURCE: Chest, December 2004.