• 11/12/2006
  • Australia
  • Marg Wenham
  • The Courier Mail (www.news.com.au)

Australians were last night presented with the most gruesome anti-smoking advertisement aired yet.

The ad, depicting a female smoker whose face is severely disfigured from mouth and throat cancer, was broadcast after 9.30pm due to its graphic nature.

At the ad’s launch yesterday, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health, Karen Struthers, said she believed the anti-smoking commercial was the most graphic ever produced in Australia.

Costing $440,000 and jointly funded by the Government and the Queensland Cancer Fund, its target was adults.

“We make no apologies for the graphic nature of the ad,” she said. “We must be brutally honest about the devastating consequences of smoking.”

Ms Struthers said smoking was a major cause of cancers of the mouth and throat. In 2003, 2052 Australians, including 211 Queenslanders, died from such cancers.

Queensland Health oral health consultant Dr Arabelle Clayden said the advertisement provided an accurate depiction of the ravages of mouth and throat cancer and put a human face to the statistics.

Those who developed it could lose teeth, parts of their tongue, jaw bone and larynx.

They may never be able to properly eat, talk or breathe again and their appearance would be permanently disfigured.

Only half of those treated, she said, survived.

Queensland Cancer Fund’s Dr Suzanne Steginga said the last advertising campaign run between May and July, which depicted the smoking-linked amputation of a gangrenous leg, had resulted in a 300 per cent increase in calls to the Quit help line.

“Every time you run a campaign like this, what you are actually doing is raising the level of awareness among people who are smoking – moving them into that category of people who are contemplating giving up,” she said.