Wairarapa teens stubbing out

Teens in Wairarapa are shunning cigarettes with the number of daily smokers dropping to below 5 per cent.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) 2014 survey results show fewer Wairarapa Year 10 students aged 14 and 15 are smoking every day or regularly, compared with the previous survey.

Wairarapa previously had the worst rate in the country for Year 10 regular smokers, which includes daily, weekly and monthly smokers.

This has dropped from 11.8 per cent to 9 per cent.

There was also an increase in the number of teens reporting that they had never smoked.

Wairarapa still has one of the highest rates of daily smokers when compared with other areas and is above the national average of 2.8 per cent.

South Canterbury teens were top of the table with 7.5 per cent of teens saying they smoked daily, followed by Northland at 7 per cent and Wairarapa at 4.7 per cent.

Nationally, it is the first time daily smoking rates have fallen below 3 per cent since the survey began in 1999.

The survey found Maori girls are three times more likely to smoke every day than girls or boys of other ethnicities.

This is the largest survey of youth smoking in New Zealand, sampling around 30,000 Year 10 students. Since the first survey, the number of students smoking daily in Wairarapa has more than halved.