File photo / Brett Phibbs
It is described as the biggest public health disaster in the history of
the world, with its perpetrators likened to terrorists. Smoking will kill up to
a billion people worldwide this century, unless governments across the world
stamp down on the half-trillion-dollar tobacco industry.
These are the words of John Seffrin, chief executive of the American
Cancer Society, who was speaking this weekend at a high-level forum of the
world's 100 leading cancer experts gathered in the Swiss resort of Lugano, who
issued a stark warning to governments worldwide. They said governments must do
far more than they have done to control the global tobacco industry, either by
raising cigarette prices dramatically, outlawing tobacco marketing or by taxing
the multinational profits of the big cigarette firms.
Smoking kills more than half of all smokers, mostly from cancer, and yet
despite it being the single biggest avoidable risk of premature death, there
are about 30 million new smokers a year, scientists have calculated. If current
trends continue, with cigarette companies targeting the non-smoking populations
of the developing world, then hundreds of millions of people will be dying of
cancer in the second half of this century, they said.
Some of the experts attending the World Oncology Forum went further by
calling for an outright ban on cigarettes and for the tobacco industry to be
treated as a terrorist movement for the way it targets new markets with a
product that it knows to be deadly when used as intended. "We have a major
global industry producing a product that is lethal to at least half the people
who use it. It will kill, if current trends continue, a billion people this
century," said Dr Seffrin, who leads the US national society dedicated to
eliminating cancer. "It killed 100 million in the last century and we
thought that was outrageous, but this will be the biggest public health
disaster in the history of the world, bar none. It all could be avoided if we
could prevent the terroristic tactics of the tobacco industry in marketing its
products to children," Dr Seffrin told The Independent.
"There is a purposeful intent to market a product that they know
full well will harm their customers and over time will kill more than half of
them. The industry needs to be reined in and regulated," he said. The science
showing that tobacco is the single biggest cause of cancer is now well
established, following the publication of the earliest evidence in the 1950s by
the late Sir Richard Doll, the Oxford epidemiologist who was born 100 years ago
yesterday.
Worldwide, tobacco causes about 22 per cent of cancer deaths each year,
killing some 1.7 million people, with almost 1 million of them dying from lung
cancer. Yet the numbers of new smokers among the young is rising faster than
the numbers giving up. The latest study into the health effects of smoking,
published last Saturday in The Lancet, involved 1.3 million women. It
showed tobacco is even more dangerous than previously supposed, but the
benefits of giving up smoking are greater than expected.
Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University, a co-author of the Million Women
study who worked closely with Sir Richard Doll, is also the scientist who first
calculated how many people this century will die from tobacco-induced cancers.
"We have about 30 million new smokers a year in the world. On present
patterns, most of them are not going to stop, and if they don't stop, and if
half of them die from it, then that means more than 10 million a year will die
- that's 100 million a decade in the second half of the century," said Prof
Peto. "So this century we're going to see something like a billion deaths
from smoking if we carry on as we are. In Europe we have about 1.3 million
premature deaths per year now, of which about 0.3 million are deaths by
tobacco. There's nothing else as big as that," he added. "If you put
all causes together, you wouldn't get a total that's half of that caused by
tobacco, and tobacco kills more people by cancer than other diseases. Smoking
is still the most important cause of cancer... If you smoke a few cigarettes a
day, it will be the most dangerous thing you do."
European countries need to raise cigarette prices significantly because
this is the one proven method of reducing consumption, Sir Richard said. They
should adopt a "triple-half-double" strategy, which was tried in
France in the 1990s, when cigarette prices were tripled, consumption halved and
the tobacco tax revenues to the French government doubled.
"The governments of Europe desperately need to be able to raise
taxes and to do so in politically acceptable ways. Doing it for health reasons,
by tripling the price of cigarettes and halving the consumption, is a way of
doing both," Prof Peto said. "If we are talking of prevention in
Europe then a quarter of all cancer deaths are due to tobacco. In many
countries, the numbers of women dying of tobacco are rising."
Asked whether a policy of tripling cigarette prices would hit poor
smokers harder than the rich, Sir Richard said: "They are hit hardest
already. Almost half of the social inequality in death is tobacco deaths. If
you can help them to stop, then you are doing them and their families a
favour." The World Oncology Forum, organised by the European School of
Oncology, agreed governments must do more to combat tobacco marketing,
especially when directed at younger non-smokers. One suggestion was that the
profits of multinationals should be taxed globally so they cannot exploit
national differences in revenue collection. There was agreement among the
experts that more legislation and controls were needed to stop the "global
scandal" of tobacco marketing.
Prof Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London said the developing world
will see an explosion in cancer in the coming decades as the disease suffers
from "globalisation" caused in a large part by smoking. "It is a
scandal that tobacco is the biggest risk factor for cancer, and that more
people will be smoking next year. And yet we know that some things will make a
really big difference at very little cost," Prof Vineis said.
Source: NZ Herald
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