Kitap Hakkında

Dear Readers,

We are happy to greet you with the first electronic issue of the Turkish Journal of Public

Health. We hope you are having easier access to the Journal in its new format.

You will find in this issue four original research articles; one of these articles is about

smoking during pregnancy.

The year 2008 has a special importance regarding tobacco issue. First of all, the coverage of

the “Anti-Tobacco Law” of Turkey was extended in 2008 to include bars, restaurants and

cafes; and Turkey became one of the leading countries in tobacco control activities.

Additionally, World Health Organization published a report on the global tobacco epidemic

which is the first in a series of WHO reports that will track the status of the tobacco epidemic

and the impact of interventions implemented to stop it. This report introduces six strategies

under the title of “The MPOWER package” where one of the strategies is about monitoring

tobacco use and prevention policies. Likewise, smoking rates and changing trends have been

investigating by researchers in selected groups. In this issue of the Journal, Tokuc et al

discuss smoking in pregnancy and associated factors among 457 working women. Pregnancy

in fact, can be considered an opportunity for quitting cigarette smoking. However according

to results of the study, 20 % of smoker women continued smoking during pregnancy; in

addition, almost half of the quitters resumed smoking after childbirth. It was found that

husband smoking was one of the associated factors for smoking during pregnancy. They

suggest husbands/partners of pregnant women should also be participated in the smoking

cessation programme to gain information about smoking risks to the fetus.

The other research are about different topics such as, trends and risk factors in infant

mortality, social distance of medical students from a person in a depression vignette and some

environmental health specifications at state primary schools in Turkey.

We hope you enjoy this issue of the Turkish Journal of Public Health and we would like to

thank all the authors and reviewers who contributed to this issue of the journal.