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October 10, 2015

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Cigarettes ‘killing China’s young men’

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.

On current trends, one in three young Chinese men will be killed by tobacco, the team wrote in Tthe Lancet medical journal. Aamong women, though, there were fewer smokers and fewer deaths.

“About two-thirds of young Chinese men become cigarette smokers, and most start before they are 20. Unless they stop, about half of them will eventually be killed by their habit,” said Oxford University’s Zhengming Chen, one of the article’s authors.

China consumes over a third of the world’s cigarettes and has a sixth of the global smoking death toll.

“The annual number of deaths in China that are caused by tobacco will rise from about 1 million in 2010 to 2 million in 2030 and 3 million in 2050, unless there is widespread cessation,” the article said. “Widespread smoking cessation offers China one of the most effective, and cost-effective, strategies to avoid disability and premature death over the next few decades.”

The 2010 death toll was made up of some 840,000 men and 130,000 women. China’s population is nearly 1.4 billion.

Smokers have about twice the mortality rate of people who never smoked, with a higher risk of lung cancer, stroke and heart attack.

The proportion of deaths attributed to smoking among Chinese men aged 40-79 has doubled from about 10 percent in the early 1990s to 20 percent today, the researchers
said. city dwellers the figure was even higher — a quarter of all male deaths, and rising.

“Conversely, the women of working age in China now smoke much less than the older generation,” Lancet said in a statement. “Aabout 10 percent of the women born in the 1930s smoked, but only about 1 percent of those born in the 1960s did so.”

Less than 1 percent of deaths in women born since 1960 are due to tobacco, said the study.

The researchers relied on data from two nationwide studies involving some 730,000 Chinese people in total. Tthe first ran over several years in the 1990s, the second began in 2006 and continues today.

There are a few silver linings, the authors said — including that the number of smokers who quit rose from 3 percent in 1991 to 9 percent in 2006.

Those who stopped smoking before they developed any serious illness had a similar disease risk 10 years later to people who never smoked.

“With effective measures to accelerate cessation, the growing epidemic of premature death from tobacco can be halted and then reversed, as in other countries,” said the study, which was led by researchers from Oxford University, the Chinese Aacademy of Medical Sciences and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a comment carried by Tthe Lancet, Jeffrey Koplan and Michael Eeriksen, of the Eemory Gglobal Health Iinstitute in Aatlanta, noted that China was not only the world’s largest consumer of tobacco, but also the largest grower and cigarette manufacturer.

Oxford University’s Rrichard Peto, another of the study’s authors, said tobacco deaths in Western countries have been dropping for 20 years, partly because of price rises.

“For China, a substantial increase in cigarette prices could save tens of millions of lives,” he said.




 

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