Many EU countries have already taken concrete measures to address the smoking epidemic and have succeeded in lowering smoking rates in their populations. Several Nordic and Western European countries are therefore now in stage 4 of the epidemic. However, several countries in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe are in the early stages of the epidemic and are just now adopting a national strategy against smoking. What is particularly alarming for these countries is that adolescent and youth rates of smoking are very high and have been increasing.

Therefore, euFAQT is implemented in countries in the early stages of the smoking epidemic, where adolescent smoking rates are particularly high.

Indicatively recent smoking rates are the following:

• Bulgaria 32.7%
• Hungary 30.4%
• Romania 21.4%
• Poland 33%
• Slovakia 28%
• Greece 37.6%

(Percentage of daily smokers aged 15+ in the EU-27 (source: WHO-HFA, 2007)

It goes without saying that developing and evaluating successful interventions for smoking cessation and prevention, to be available for further use, are among euFAQT project’s basic aims.