Smoking will kill 10 million
2007-11-11 21:24
Cape Town - Tobacco-related deaths
are expected to double to 10 million a year by 2030, with most
fatalities in developing countries, a senior World Lung
Foundation (WLF) official said on Friday.
Judith Longstaff Mackay, the organisation's global tobacco
control programme co-ordinator, said while cigarette markets were
getting smaller in advanced economies, the opposite was true
for developing states, where the number of smokers and the
volume each consumes is growing.
"I think it's important not to get into competitive deaths,
but there's about three million TB deaths a year, whereas there are
five million deaths a year from tobacco and these are going up,"
Mackay told Reuters in an interview.
Burden on developing countries
"By 2030 that five million will be closer to 10 million,
they'll be doubling ... and the major burden is on developing
countries," she said on the sidelines of an international lung
health conference.
The foundation works with groups such as the World Health
Organisation (WHO) to promote lung health. Mackay is a senior
policy adviser to the WHO and a critic of cigarette industry
policies.
Cigarette smoking is a major cause of cancer of the lung,
throat, bladder and other serious medical conditions.
Despite scientific proof of health risks associated with
smoking, Mackay said more people were lighting up worldwide,
with an estimated 1.64 billion smokers expected by 2030, from
1.3 billion today.
The global tobacco trade is estimated at hundreds of
billions of dollars each year, with China and the United States
the world's two largest cigarette manufacturers, according to
the American Cancer Society.
It describes China as a "ticking time bomb" with
approximately 320 million smokers while it says smoking is
responsible for nearly one in five deaths in the United States.
According to the 2006 edition of The Tobacco Atlas,
published by the American Cancer Society, the four countries
with the highest number of male smokers - who make up the
majority of the world's smokers - were Yemen, Djibouti,
Cambodia and China.
"Particularly in Asia there is greater spending power,
greater financial success, so that people can buy more
cigarettes," Mackay said.
Mackay said developing countries were making progress by
implementing some bans on public smoking and tobacco
advertising.