Source: Reuter

Tobacco poses death, disability threat to Asia

By Benjamin Kang Lim
BEIJING (Reuter) Asia is the newest battleground for
Western cigarette manufacturers and faces the biggest threat of
death and disability from tobacco, organizers of an
international antismoking conference warned Sunday.
``China and many other developing nations face a catastrophe
in the coming decades unless we can reverse this inexorable rise
in cigarette sales,'' said Lu Rushan, secretarygeneral of the
10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.
``China and many other countries in Asia...must do more if
we are to prevent a tidal wave of death and disability from
tobacco engulfing us in the next century,'' Lu told the opening
of the conference in the cavernous Great Hall of the People.
Western tobacco companies, squeezed by hostile antismoking
activism back home, were increasingly eyeing Asian countries
such as China as new markets, delegates said.
``The battleground is moving to the countries of the
developing world,'' organizers said in a statement.
Women were a vulnerable group because smoking figures among
them were low and the potential female market was huge, the
organizers said. China, for example, had an army of 300 million
smokers, but only 20 million were women.
Sports and the arts were also vulnerable because they needed
sponsorship and the tobacco industry was ever ready to
capitalise on this, the organizers said.
Foreign cigarettes have skirted China's ban on tobacco
advertising by financing the cashstrapped sporting world.
Marlboro sponsored the soccer league, Salem backed a tennis
tournament and 555 bankrolled the Hong KongBeijing car rally.
``This is an issue which transcends national boundaries and
requires action on an international scale,'' Lu said of the
antismoking campaign.
The fiveday conference has attracted 2,000 experts from 103
countries and will focus on the tobacco industry's expansion
into developing countries, the targeting of women smokers,
tobacco litigation and legislation.
China's Communist Party chief and state president Jiang
Zemin gave the opening address at the conference, seen as a shot
in the arm for the antismoking movement.
China is the world's largest producer and consumer of
tobacco.
About 500,000 people die each year in China from
tobaccorelated illnesses and the figure is expected to surge to
two million by the year 2025, health officials say.
The first three causes of death in the world's most populous
nation cancer, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory
diseases are all related to smoking, health officials say.
^REUTER@