Washington, July 7 (Reuters): There has been a slight increase in the number of US teens smoking cigarettes, researchers reported yesterday.

They also suggested that efforts to stop children from smoking have stalled.

The latest analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds the percentage of high school students reporting that they have smoked cigarettes in the past month increased to 23 per cent in 2005 from 21.9 per cent in 2003.

The increase is the first since a steady 40 per cent decline in high school smoking rates between 1997, when 36.4 per cent of high school students smoked, and 2003.

“The national decline in youth smoking observed during 1997 to 2003 might have stalled,” the CDC writes in its weekly report on sickness and death.

There are several possible reasons, said Dr Terry Pechachek of the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health. For one, states have not been consistently raising taxes on cigarettes, although such tax increases have been shown to reduce youth smoking.

States are also not funding educational campaigns in schools and the media like they used to, he said. The researchers also noted in the report that there has been “substantial increases in tobacco industry expenditures on tobacco advertising and promotion in the US, from $5.7 billion in 1997 to $15.2 billion in 2003.”

“Additionally, smoking in movies, which has been linked to youth smoking, increased rapidly beginning in the early 1990s and by 2002 was at levels observed in 1950,” they wrote.