HEALTH : Tobacco Warning Unseen by Teens

Careful tracking of teen-agers’ eyeballs as they read cigarette ads has shown the health warnings by the surgeon general’s office are barely seen, much less read or remembered, doctors said today.

Using state-of-the-art techniques that reveal exactly which parts of magazine advertisements people look at, a team of doctors from the Department of Family Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta found the 45 teen-agers studied spent less than a second glancing at the health warnings in five tobacco ads taken from magazines. In nearly half of the cases, the youths failed to even look at the warning.