Say Yes to No–smoking: Case Study Croatia

Abstract

Smoking is the main health risk factor that can be avoided, but remains the largest single cause of premature death in developed countries, accounting for almost 20% of all mortality. Smoking increases the risk of approximately 30 diseases, for some of them even by 10 to 30 times. There exist different measures/intervention programmes to tackle the problem of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns being one of them. Every year, 13,000-14,000 people in Croatia die from the consequences of smoking. Although the advantages of quitting smoking are wellknown, large number of smokers find hard to give up smoking. As a response to this problem, in Croatia the campaign »Say Yes to No-smoking« was organized. As a part of this campaign, a first national »Smoke Out Day« was organized on March 2003 under the slogan »Croatia Breathes«.