ISLAMABAD (APP) - A day-long consultative meeting of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Thursday decided the nature, selection and size of pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs to educate users about negative effects of tobacco use. The meeting which was organized by Tobacco Control Cell, Ministry of Health in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) decided that multi pictorial warnings should be used besides effective text on cigarette packs. The meeting decided that besides collecting pictures from the available pool with the tobacco control cell and WHO, effective pictures will also be collected from professionals. It is pertinent to mention here that the government had announced on the occasion of World No Tobacco Day introduction of pictorial health warnings on the cigarette packs and outers with effect from January 1, 2010. Mrs. Shaheen Masud, DG Implementation, Tobacco Control Cell said that large picture warnings are particularly effective in communicating health effects to low literacy population, children and young people. She said health warnings and messages that generate negative emotions such as fear are more effective. She added there should be two or more sets of pictorial health warnings and messages. She said tobacco is currently the second major cause of death in the world and half the people who smoke regularly or close to 500 million people, will eventually be killed by tobacco. She said it is the fact that hundreds of thousand of people who have never smoked die each year from caused by breathing second hand tobacco smoke. She said there is no doubt that breathing second-hand smoke is very dangerous to human health. She said second hand smoke causes cancer, as well as many serious respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in children and adults, often leading to death, adding, it is also contributing to high disease burden of non-communicable disease.