There can be only small wonder at the fact that one of the many experts attending the 8th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Dublin was able to report that many smokers and ex-smokers diagnosed as having cancer experience guilt and anger. As has been known and promulgated for a generation, smoking causes lung cancer. The real wonder must be about just how this message has either failed to get through, or has been rationalised or ignored by those already addicted to nicotine. Clearly, there must be much more focused and more effective actions taken; in the first instance, to prevent young people from becoming addicted and, in the second instance, to assist the addicts to break from tobacco and the risks associated with its use.
The size and extent of the problems resulting from tobacco are formidable, and growing daily. Lung cancer is only one of a number of lethal diseases that are globally known to result from the consumption of tobacco, yet estimates suggest that it alone has been responsible for 20 million deaths in this century, and there will be several million more before this decade concludes with the millennium. The banning of smoking in an increasing number of public places may well help to reinforce the message of the high risk of smoking but, to put the situation very bluntly, there is no point in prohibiting people from smoking in the corridors of the United States Congress while the American tobacco industry is legally permitted to peddle its lethally addictive product around the world.
In recent months there has been a more focused attack on the American tobacco industry than had previously been evident and some progress has been made insofar as the industry has been forced to admit more publicly than before that its products are indeed both addictive and lethal. But, as one of the speakers at this week's conference pointed out, the sums offered in the US by way of compensation to victims and health-care agencies are minuscule relative to the total global markets and revenues of the industry.
The European Union and its member-states must urgently bring the same pressures to bear on those who produce and would sell tobacco products. And there must be global agreements - with realistic means of enforcement - which will prevent all tobacco manufacturers from exporting their products to those less developed countries which have become prime targets for these lethal sales yet have no restrictions to protect the health of present or future generations of their citizens.
It has been encouraging, in terms of the ultimate saving of smokers' lives, to hear from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (the organisers of the current conference in Dublin) that better means of the earliest possible means of detection of lung cancer are being developed, and that some more effective treatments are emerging. But these therapeutic developments will not come without considerable cost to all health services. Above all, they will not stop the further spread of the diseases which result from smoking. Only concerted social, educational and political action on a global basis has any hope of doing that. It is already past the time that such concerted action should be intensified right around the world.
What better way to mark the millennium?