A Third of Chinese Men Will Die From Smoking If Current Trends Continue

One in three Chinese men is set to die a premature death due to smoking unless cigarette habits change in the world's most populous nation, medical researchers have found.

A report published in the medical journal The Lancet on Friday said two thirds of Chinese men start smoking before the age of 20. If current trends continue, half of them will die a smoking-related death.

Around 1 million people died from smoking in China in 2010. Unless "aggressive public health action" is taken, according to the report, this number will double to two million people, mostly men, dying by 2030.

"China is at the epicenter of the global tobacco epidemic," wrote the scientists, who studied the smoking habits of around 730,000 Chinese people over a 14-year period.

Chinese men are starting to smoke at a younger and younger age, greatly increasing the eventual health risks. The only positive news was that tobacco-related deaths are falling in women, who hardly smoke at all in comparison — just 3.2 percent of women were smokers between 2004 and 2008 compared to 68 percent of men.

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A huge barrier to change was the mammoth size of China's tobacco industry and its contribution to government coffers, pointed out the study, which was carried out by scientists from Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control.

"China is the world's largest grower, manufacturer, and consumer of tobacco and has the largest workforce devoted to tobacco farming, manufacturing, and sales," the researchers wrote. "Being a government monopoly, China Tobacco (the Chinese National Tobacco Corporation) provides over 7 percent of the Central Government's annual revenue through both taxes and net income."

The report also highlighted the "myths about tobacco" that have complicated efforts to improve public health.

"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," it said.

Tobacco deaths in western countries have been dropping for 20 years, partly because of significant rises in cost, one of the co-authors, Oxford University's Richard Peto, told AFP.

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

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