Modeling the effect of fear-inducing awareness programs on smoking cessation

Smoking remains a significant public health challenge, contributing to numerous preventable diseases and mortality worldwide. Addressing this issue requires innovative strategies to enhance smoking cessation rate. In this research work, we develop a mathematical model to evaluate the impact of fear-inducing awareness programs on promoting smoking cessation. The model incorporates the parameters depicting the behavioral changes of individuals to capture the dynamic interplay between fear-driven awareness programs and smoking behavior. We analyze the local and global stability of the equilibria obtained from the model, providing a comprehensive understanding of the system’s dynamics. Furthermore, we identify critical bifurcation phenomena, including saddle–node and transcritical bifurcations, occurring in both forward and backward directions, which elucidate the system’s qualitative changes under parameter variations. Numerical simulations are conducted using smoking prevalence data from the United States of America (USA) to validate the analytical results and explore the influence of key parameters on smoking behavior. Our findings highlight that intensifying the fear component within awareness programs is more effective in promoting smoking cessation compared to merely increasing the number of such programs.