U.S. battle against teen smoking stalls: CDC

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Efforts to reduce teen smoking have stalled in the past five years as states lose funding for anti-tobacco efforts and as companies use new strategies to recruit customers, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.

While fewer youths are trying cigarettes for the first time, overall smoking rates stayed stable at just under 22 percent for students aged 14 to 18 between 2003 and 2007, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

Many fewer students have ever tried a cigarette -- just 50 percent, down from 70 percent in 1999. But CDC officials were not celebrating this number.

"We had seen this great progress from 1999 to 2003 and we were turning around this epidemic of increase in the 1990s that had everybody concerned," Terry Pechacek of CDC's Office on Smoking and Health said in a telephone interview.

"Unfortunately, that progress has not been maintained."

The CDC looked at a regular survey of tens of thousands of high school students done every year by the federal government.

The percentage of students who said they had ever smoked a cigarette fell from 70 percent in 1999 to 58 percent in 2003 and 50 percent in 2007, it found.

There were also fewer frequent smokers, with just 8 percent of students saying they smoked 20 or more cigarettes in the past month, compared to 16.8 percent in 1999.