Source: www.telegraphindia.com Author: staff Packets of chewing tobacco sold across India after December 1, 2011 will have to show graphic images portraying the disfiguring effects of oral cancer, but cigarette and bidi packets may show milder pictures, the Union health ministry said today. The health ministry has notified two new sets of pictorial warnings — harsher images for packets of chewing tobacco — that will replace the existing pictures, scorpions on chewed tobacco products, and diseased lungs on cigarette and bidi packets. Cancer and public health specialists have welcomed the new images, but pointed out that the choice of images given to manufacturers of smoking tobacco will allow them to use a milder warning of a man with diseased lungs rather than of mouth cancer. “I’m not happy at all at the choice of pictures for smoking tobacco products,” said Pankaj Chaturvedi, an associate professor of head and neck cancer surgery at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. “Pictorial warnings need to have a strong deterrence effect that impacts people — the pictures for chewing tobacco are likely to have such an effect, but the pictures for smoking tobacco don’t,” he said. “The new four pictures for chewing tobacco are very similar and graphically depict the consequences of mouth cancer,” said Monika Arora, the head of health promotion and tobacco control at the Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi. But three of the four images for smoking tobacco packets show a male with lungs in different stages of disease, while [...]