There have been many campaigns aimed at encouraging people to stop smoking and preferably at persuading them not to start in the first place. None of them seems to have had a significant impact on the number of young people who turn to cigarettes as part of the rite of passage to adulthood, usually following in the smoky slipstream of their peers.

It is hard to get through to a young person the harm that smoking can do. To them, heart disease and lung cancer are things which affect older people. Why should they worry about something that is far away in the future?

Yet the damage that cigarettes can cause begins early on. As Di Woodall, Bradford's Stop Smoking Bus co-ordinator, says, although a young smoker may get out of breath, it is not something that they regard as life-threatening. But the cause of that breathlessness is real physical damage as fat forms in the arteries.

The process is currently being graphically demonstrated in the new series of public-information adverts which are the backbone of the latest campaign to persuade people to shun tobacco. They are hard-hitting, to say the least. The sight of lard oozing and dripping from the end of a cigarette, in one instance dropping on to a woman smoker's clothing, has the power to turn many a stomach.

This campaign, at least, appears to be having some effect. More young smokers that ever before are visiting the Stop Smoking Bus in Bradford. Hopefully, too, young people who have yet to smoke will be deterred from trying that first cigarette which could set them on the road to lifelong ill health.