“Smoking will cause about 20% of all adult male deaths in China during the 2010s”, Chen and his colleagues write.
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CIGARETTE smoking will kill about 2 million Chinese in 2030, double the 2010 toll, researchers said yesterday as they warned of a “growing epidemic of premature death” in the world’s most populous nation. As per survey, the number of male deaths has reached 1 million by 2010 and would hit 2 million by 2030 if smoking isn’t stopped. The first study took place in the 1990s, and involved a quarter of a million men. “Aabout 10 percent of the women born in the 1930s smoked, but only about 1 percent of those born in the 1960s did so”.
The death rate for men was not the same for women though, as there were fewer female smokers.
Around half of those men will die from the habit, it concludes.
“These include the belief that protective biological mechanisms specific to Asian populations make smoking less hazardous, that it is easy to quit smoking, and that tobacco use is an intrinsic and ancient part of Chinese culture”.
But researchers say this trend can be slowed or turned around if smokers quit.
A new study reports that one-third of China’s young men will likely die from tobacco-related health conditions and diseases, but that figure can drop if they quit smoking.
Richard Peto a professor at Britain’s University of Oxford who co-led the research, said price hikes on cigarettes in China may be one way to reduce smoking rates.
“While men are at substantial risk of death and disease from active smoking, women are at risk from passive exposure at home and in the workplace”, said the report.
China is the world’s largest tobacco consumer.
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However, “people still lack access to smoking cessation tools and services”, said Wu Yiqun, deputy director of the ThinkTank Research Center for Health Development, a non-governmental organization in Beijing committed to tobacco control. While the habit kills about 5 million people each year. “To save hundreds of thousands of lives in the coming decades, Cancer Research United Kingdom is calling on the government to commit to an ambitious new tobacco control strategy that shares our vision of a tobacco free generation by 2035”. Studies show that we are seeing a significant decrease in tobacco deaths over the last 20 years in direct correlation with the increased price per cigarette pack.
