Source: Reuter

World tobacco conference closes with dire warnings

By Mure Dickie
BEIJING, Aug 28 (Reuter) Tobacco smoking posed a growing
menace to society and would claim 10 million lives annually by
the year 2025, an international conference was told on Thursday.
The 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health closed with
strong warnings of a need for caution in settlements on
liability claims over the effect of smoking.
Tobacco shared only with AIDS the claim to being a major
growing cause of premature death, said Judith Mackay of the
Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control.
By 2025, smoking would kill 10 million people a year, she
said.
``Tobacco's share of all death and disability worldwide
will increase from the current three percent to nine percent by
2025,'' Mackay said.
A resolution adopted by the meeting, which drew nearly 1,500
delegates from around the world, urged governments to consider
carefully the implications of any liability settlements reached
with the tobacco industry.
Activists said the motion was clearly aimed at the United
States, where a proposed $368.5 billion settlement between the
tobacco industry and state attorneys general was under review.
It requires congressional approval.
The resolution called on governments to ensure such
settlements did not boost worldwide tobacco deaths and
protected the legal rights of those not directly represented.
Settlements should force the cigarette companies to pay for
damages caused by tobacco and should not inhibit public scrutiny
of the industry, it said.
The U.S. deal failed on such conditions, making the
resolution a powerful call for U.S. President Bill Clinton to
oppose the settlement under review, argued Professor Stanton
Glantz of the University of California.
``The tobacco industry desperately wants this deal...but the
White House won't do this in the face of open opposition from
the public health community,'' Glantz said in an interview.
``I've been to lots of these meetings but, for one time,
this one may actually make a difference,'' he said.
Tobacco consultant Mackay, a senior conference organiser,
denied charges by campaigners against the settlement that direct
reference to the United States had been cut from the resolution
because of pressure from the meeting's Chinese hosts.
Glantz said Beijing's representatives had opposed such
references in order to avoid interference in another country's
internal affairs.
Conference officials said the U.S. settlement was among the
hottest topics at the meeting, which also aimed to focus action
on smoking by women and children and in the developing world.
The conference grounds were for five days a rare smokefree
zone in Beijing.
In her closing address, Mackay painted a bleak future on
smokingrelated fatalities but said it was clear that by the
21st century many countries would be enacting unprecedented
restrictions on tobacco use.
While such countries enjoyed robust health education
programmes, nations slower to move against the tobacco industry
would grapple with epidemicscale lung cancer and heart disease,
she said.