Public health advocates want tobacco companies to advertise the lethality of their products.

The US federal court has upheld a 2012 ruling forcing tobacco giants to run advertisements admitting that they deceived American consumers about the dangers of smoking.

The first advertisements will soon be printed in leading newspapers and in and 30- to 45-second ads on the ABC, CBS and NBC television networks.

The advertisements will run for a year, costing Altria, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard and Philip Morris USA millions of dollars.

Public health experts have written to the heads of British American Tobacco and Philip Morris in Australia, calling for them to run a similar advertising campaign.

“We hope that you will share our view that Australians are entitled to the same level of information as the American public about these companies’ deceitful practices and the ways in which these companies and the tobacco industry more broadly have lied to the public and your consumers over decades,” the letter states.

“As you will be aware, some 1.8 million Australians now alive are likely to die because they smoked, in large part because of the activities over time of global tobacco companies such as yours.

“We therefore call on your company to make a commitment to publishing the same corrective statements in Australia and other countries as those you are publishing in the USA and to run those advertisements for the same 12-month duration and intensity as those being run in the USA.”

Signatories include CEO of the Public Health Association and president of the World Federation of Public Health Associations, Michael Moore, president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, Maurice Swanson, and tobacco control experts Prof Simon Chapman and Prof Mike Daube.

Philip Morris continues to vigorously fight Australia’s plain packaging laws since they were introduced in 2011.

“We call on this most lethal of industries to tell the truth to the Australian public about the massive toll of death and disease caused by smoking, and its record of manipulating everything from marketing to the product itself,” Dr Daube said.

“Here, as in the US, they have lied for too long.”