[Smoking prevention in the school: results of a 3-year program]

Tobacco use poses one of the greatest health problems at school. Its prevention through health education should be assumed up by all members of the school community and health personnel (especially family and respiratory physicians). We designed an anti-tobacco program lasting three years aimed at all the students of the 6th, 7th and 8th grades at school as well as those in the pre-university years that was implemented in a rural area. This study reports the results of the attitudes of the 610 students (256 boys and 354 girls, between 11 and 20 years old) collected at the end of the program. 59.4% of the boys and 44.1% of the girls reported having smoked on some occasion. The mean age at the time of the first contact with tobacco was 11.8 +/- 2.4 years, this being significantly different between the boys and the girls. The main reasons for starting to smoke tobacco were quoted as peer pressure (57.1%) and curiosity (55.5%). That their parents smoked was only adduced as a reason by 29.5% of the students. Knowledge of the harmful effects of tobacco was limited and only 57% related tobacco smoking to lung cancer and only 41% to coronary pathology. At the end of the program 13.6% of the students involved smoked. 93.9% of those who quit smoking related this event to the program. Of those still smoking, 63.6% said they would like to quit. This justifies the need to reinforce the knowledge that will allow them to switch attitudes and stop smoking. Intervention programs in school populations have proved to be useful in the struggle to decrease smoking among school children. If an adolescent can avoid smoking it is likely that s/he will not smoke in adulthood. It is necessary to further develop this type of anti-tobacco program as reflected in this paper.