AB009. References of passive smoking and anti-smoking law in Greek electronic news media

Background: Despite the proven harmful effects of passive smoking (PS) in health, the anti-smoking legislation (AL) in Greece is still not being implemented and the electronic media addresses the issue in various ways. The aim of the study was the collection, classification and correlation of PS and AL references in national and local Greek electronic media, in three time periods specified by the adoption of the respective anti-smoking laws: N.3730/08 (A period), N.3868/10 (B period), and N.3986/11 (C period).

Methods: The population studied included 67 newspapers that were derived from the list of the General Secretariat of Information and Communication, through which a total of 548 articles about PS and AL were found. Statistical analysis was done using «SPSS 19.0 for Windows» and the tests used were: Mann-Whitney U test, Wilcoxon’s signed-rank test, and Spearman.

Results: 347 articles were found for PS (212 were of general and 135 were of specific content) and 201 articles related to AL. The three most frequent specific references titles were: “passive smoking risks”, “passive smoking of children”, and “the cost of smoking in the economy”. The majority of the newspapers belonged to the daily editions of regional electronic media. The largest number of reports appeared in the newspapers of: the city of Athens, Attica prefecture (excluding the city of Athens) as well as in the Ionian and Aegean islands. Comparatively the greatest intensity in the relationship among references about PS and AL for all newspapers appeared in the B period, followed by the C and D periods. The strongest correlation among references was presented by the Athenian media in the A and B period and the Daily (local) media in the B, and C period.

Conclusions: The issue of PS and the antismoking legislation was particularly raised by electronic media during the B period which may be ought to the fact that the law N.3868/2010 imposed a total ban on smoking in public places in comparison to the other two laws that incorporated exceptions.

Keywords: Smoking; passive smoking; anti-smoking law