Wholesale data for surveillance of Australian Aboriginal tobacco consumption in the Northern Territory.

Objectives: Effective monitoring of trends in tobacco use is an essential element of tobacco control policy. Monitoring tobacco consumption using tobacco wholesale data has advantages over other methods of surveillance. In the present work, a research project that monitored tobacco consumption in 25 remote Aboriginal communities and its translation to a policy to implement this monitoring routinely in the entire Northern Territory of Australia is described.

Monitoring local trends in Indigenous tobacco consumption.

Objective: To compare two methods of monitoring tobacco consumption in remote Indigenous communities.

Methods: We examined the monthly difference between wholesale invoice and point-of-sale data for tobacco products from three stores from remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. We assessed three measures of wholesale data.