Promoting smoking cessation in Russian Karelia: a 1-year community-based program with quasi-experimental evaluation

Cigarette smoking is a major contributor to the East-West health gap in Eur ope, a situation which is particularly evident in comparisons of mortality and health behavior in Finnish and Russian Karelia. With technical assistan ce from the North Karelia Project in Finland, a Quit and Win smoking cessat ion contest was organized in the district of Pitkaranta in Russian Karelia. Local health care workers organized media publicity and community support, including news about competition winners and participants, and distributio n of leaflets featuring stories about how local people were able to stop sm oking during the Quit and Win contests The Pitkaranta campaign was evaluate d in a quasi-experimental study in which panels of 176 and 202 smokers, ide ntified in a random population sample survey at the outset, were followed f or I year in Pitkaranta and a comparable neighboring district. Cessation ra tes were estimated to be 7-26% in Pitkaranta and 1-2% in the comparison are a, a statistically significant indication of experimental effects. These fi ndings demonstrate that community campaigns can effectively reduce smoking in the present difficult conditions in Russia.