Smoking to kill 20 million in Europe by millennium

LONDON (Reuter) Smoking will have killed 20 million people in Europe in
the period between 1950 and the year 2000, a leading lung specialist said
Thursday.

Nearly 500,000 people in the European Union were killed by tobacco in 1995,
said Professor Stephen Spiro, president of the European Respiratory
Society, at the body's annual congress in Berlin.

And in a survey of 250 European lung experts, three quarters thought
doctors should send the right message to patients by stopping smoking.

Nine out of 10 of those surveyed supported a Europewide ban on all forms
of tobacco advertising and promotion to cut smoking deaths.

Spiro said in a statement released in London: "Tobacco is one of Europe's
biggest killers. We must have national as well as European strategies to
limit tobacco use.

"As lung specialists we see every day on our ward rounds the devastation
that tobacco can cause. Sadly the tobacco industry is enticing more
teenagers across Europe to take up the habit in a bid to replace the
thousands of people who die every day of smokingrelated diseases.''