Smoking deaths to double in China without action: WHO

By AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
May 30, 2007

Cigarette-related deaths in China will more than double by 2020 unless the government introduces comprehensive measures to curtail smoking, the World Health Organisation said Wednesday.

Henk Bekedam, the WHO's representative in China, said smoking was "socially and economically devastating" for the country, which is the world's biggest producer of tobacco.

"The death toll from diseases associated with tobacco is about one million Chinese annually, a figure that is expected to increase to 2.2 million per year by 2020 if smoking rates remain unchanged," he said in a statement ahead of World No Tobacco Day on Thursday.

China is responsible for one third of the worlds cigarette manufacturing output and the government rakes in massive profits, as it runs a tobacco monopoly.

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