One third of all the young men in China today will be dead from smoking within the next few decades unless habits there change, new research forecasts.
The study, published this week in the British Medical Journal, tracks the rising death toll from smoking in China, where two thirds of men smoke. It confirms that cigarettes are just as harmful to Eastern populations as they are to Westerners.
PHOTO: AFP
"Whenever one gets to a new culture or another ethnic group, it has to be proved all over again. There's always a possibility that there are genetic differences and there are different factors involved," said Michael Thun, head of epidemiology at the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the study. "But the bottom line hasn't changed. It's just as deadly, it just kills you in a different way."
China, with 1.27 billion people, is home to 20 percent of the world's population and consumes 30 percent of the world's cigarettes. The Chinese government is the largest producer of cigarettes in the world.
The study tracked deaths from tobacco in Hong Kong, where people started smoking about 20 years earlier than the people of China. It takes about 50 years for the full hazard of smoking to emerge.
Researchers said the Hong Kong pattern is seen as foreshadowing that of China because the Hong Kong population was able to afford to smoke decades earlier than people in China.
"It may well foreshadow what will happen among men throughout China, and in other developing countries, over the next few decades,'' said the study, led by Oxford University epidemiologist Sir Richard Peto.
The study involved nearly all Chinese people in Hong Kong who died in 1998. The researchers noted the cause of death of 27,507 people. It found that one-quarter of all the deaths of Chinese people aged 35-69 in Hong Kong that year were attributable to tobacco.
Tobacco killed 2,534 of the 7,588 men in that age group who died that year, or 33 percent, and 169 out of the 3,341 women who died, or 5 percent.
"Two-thirds of all the young men in China, but, as yet, few of the young women, half become smokers. Have the smokers who persist will eventually be killed by their habit," said Peto, whose group is credited with confirming the link between smoking and lung cancer.
"On present smoking patterns, about one third of all the young men in China will eventually be killed by tobacco," he said.
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