Tobacco will kill one-third of all young men alive today in China if current trends in taking up smoking persist, the Chinese Health Minister, Mr Chen Minzhang, told the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Beijing yesterday.
Dr Chen based his dramatic prediction on new figures resulting from the largest-ever study on smoking deaths in China, which was conducted last year.
"Of just over 300 million males now aged 0 to 29, about 200 million will become smokers," Prof Chen told a press conference. "If they continue to smoke throughout their lives, 100 million will eventually be killed by tobacco. Half of these tobacco deaths will occur before age 70."
The survey, led by Prof Liu Boqi of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, also concluded that 750,000 deaths a year could be attributed to tobacco use in China, 50 per cent more than the figure previously estimated.
Many of the alarming statistics published at the conference seem to be based on worse-case eventualities, however, and documents published for the 1,500 international delegates showed inconsistencies.
One World Health Organisation fact sheet said: "Each year tobacco causes about 3.5 million deaths throughout the world." But another WHO paper said: "At present the widespread use of tobacco is responsible for three million deaths worldwide per year."
The conference organisers also claimed that one in three cigarettes in the world were smoked in China but the conference sponsors, the Bionax Group, said Chinese smokers consumed "30 per cent of the world's cigarettes."
Nevertheless, the fact that the Chinese Health Minister chose to reveal the results of the survey himself shows increasing anxiety in China at the highest level over the alarming effects of smoking on the Chinese population.
"China must mobilise its whole society in an effort to control tobacco," said Prof Chen, who said financial losses caused by smoking-related diseases in China were much bigger than taxes earned by tobacco sales.
The Chinese health minister is recognised internationally as an effective opponent of smoking, but also belongs to a government which owns the biggest tobacco company in the world. "Why did the Chinese state monopoly just stop producing cigarettes?" a reporter said to him.
"The tobacco industry in China is a strong part of the economic sector," Prof Chen replied candidly. "People can't quit the habit of smoking in a day. There is tobacco production because there is demand. To reduce the demand we have to step up education measures and control." He said that as part of an intensive anti-smoking programme, tobacco advertising had been banned in 10 cities, including Beijing.
Such a ban penalises only foreign cigarette companies, as Chinese brands are not promoted. A Chinese official told the news conference that the content of nicotine and tar in foreign cigarettes was usually higher than identified.
"The overall smoking rate in China for over-15s is 37.62 per cent, which is 3.74 per cent higher than the 1984 figure," said Dr Chen, giving details of the new survey. "There are 320 million smokers in the country, of which 20 million are female. The average starting age is now 20, whereas in 1984 it was 23. The death rate from lung cancer in China is increasing at an annual rate of 4.5 per cent."
Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, WHO director general, said smoking in China was a "time-bomb for the 21st century".
We are fighting not against a virus or a bacterium, but against a powerful industry which profits from marketing an addictive and toxic product which kills so many of its regular users," he said.
"Unfortunately the global response has not yet matched the seriousness of the epidemic. Too many societies around the world still look upon tobacco as acceptable behaviours. There is nothing acceptable about a product that kills 50 per cent of all those who use it."
But there were some reasons for optimism. "An increasing number of documents detailing the tobacco industry's conspiracy of silence have been exposed to public scrutiny. The admission by one tobacco company that smoking is addictive and causes heart disease and lung cancer has made a major rift in the industry's previously united front. This year has also seen a historic tobacco industry settlement in the United States."
He hoped an international convention in 2000 would frame laws for tobacco control worldwide.