Scare tactics do nothing to change behaviour

Health awareness campaigns are a waste of money.

An awareness of health risks must mean that people will change their behaviour and take up healthier habits, right. Wrong.

Recent research on alcohol use in the UK has shown no relationship between awareness of health risks and health behaviour. This research was carried out on the effectiveness of a campaign to reduce heavy drinking based on the number of alcohol units that are safe to drink. Remember those numbers?

In Ireland, the HSE also runs campaigns like this and large sums of taxpayers’ money are spent producing leaflets telling us that drinking more than 14 units of alcohol per week if you’re a woman and 21 if you’re a man is bad for your health.

Comments

#1. Posted by Tony on March 29, 2011

Not to mention, that in the case of Alcohol, public health messages are competing with the multi-million euro marketing of the alcoholic beverage industry (�68 million in 2009)... health promotion budgets simply can’t compete with that.