When it Comes to Tobacco, is it Prevention or Treatment That's Easiest on the Purse?

Health issues, and the cost effectiveness of health-care approaches, have been at the forefront of a nation-wide debate. The School of Public Health will have its own discussion tomorrow evening about the most cost efficient way to approach tobacco use. Can money be better spent on treatment than prevention?

Dr. Elbert Glover invites students and faculty to join the discussion at a passport seminar, Preventing Tobacco: Can it Work, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in room 308 of the SPH building. If you're a student with SPH, please register to attend here.

Dr. Glover, chair of Public and Community Health, will be speaking from 34 years of experience studying tobacco use. He started out as a student (one of five men studying at Texas Women's University, by the way) interested in researching subliminal perception. Dr. Glover, who was going for his doctorate degree at the time, then conducted a series of experiments to see if he could use subliminal messages to encourage smoking cessation. (He could!)

He has since then continued on to become an internationally recognized authority on the topics of smoking cessation and smokeless tobacco.

Dr. Glover was invited to share his expertise in Luxembourg last month at a conference to debate strategies to mitigate tobacco-related health-care costs in the nation. The country’s Minister of Health and Minister of Social Security were among the audience.

Healthy Turtle can give you a glimpse into what Dr. Glover presented, but to hear more, you'll have to check out the seminar tomorrow night.

Among the most effective prevention measures, he told his audience in Luxembourg, are higher cigarette taxes and price increases. Non-price measures, such as increased consumer information and availability of therapy, can also be effective. However, most non-price government controls have been less effective, according to Glover. These include prohibition measures, youth access restrictions, crop substitution and trade restrictions.

The Costs and Consequences of Tobacco Use research initiative is expected to become an annual event in Luxembourg to initiate a nation-wide focus on reducing health-care costs. Although the population growth rate has been minimal over recent years, the World Health Organization reports that the percentage of government expenditure on health-care costs has jumped more than three percent between 2000 and 2006.

To read more about Dr. Glover, click this. To find out more about the “Costs and Consequences of Tobacco Use” workshop, visit here. To find out about the American Journal of Health Behavior, for which Dr. Glover is editor-in-chief, visit here.