After years of welcome decline, teen smoking rates have leveled off in the past five years, and health officials say slack state spending on prevention is partly to blame.

Reuters reported June 26 that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that data from the period 2003-2007 show that the past-month smoking rate among 14- to 18-year-olds has held steady at about 22 percent. The rate had declined from 36 percent in 1997 to 21.9 percent in 2003.

"We had seen this great progress from 1999 to 2003 and we were turning around this epidemic of increase in the 1990s that had everybody concerned," said Terry Pechacek of CDC's Office on Smoking and Health. "Unfortunately, that progress has not been maintained."

Still, fewer adolescent started smoking, and the 2007 data showed that only 50 percent said they had ever smoked a cigarette, down from 70 percent in 1999. Just 8 percent of youths said they smoked 20 or more cigarettes in the past month, down from 16.8 percent in 1999.

Pechacek said that attention has shifted attention away from smoking to issues like obesity, that cigarette companies have cut prices, and that states have cut back on their counter-marketing against tobacco. "We are taking the emphases off of youth smoking across the nation," he said.