China to Set National Action Plan for Tobacco Control

Public health authorities in China are considering a national plan of action for tobacco control to tackle the prevailing problems of smoking.

Such a plan will have to be made by every member state of the Western Pacific Region of the World Health Organization (WHO), including China, by the end of 2001, according to a regional action plan on tobacco and health (2000-2004).

The regional plan also requires effective legislation and regulations to deter and control tobacco use by the end of 2003. "We must act right now to draft the action plan and tobacco- control strategies in line with the national conditions of China, because smoking has become an urgent public health problem in the country," Professor Wang Ke'an, president of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine (CAPM), said here today.

Sixty-three percent of male adults and four percent of females, or 320 million people, are smokers in China, making the country the world's biggest consumer of tobacco products, he told a conference on policy development for tobacco control in China in the 21st Century.

Cigarettes now claim the lives of 2,000 people in China every day, and the death toll is expected to climb to 8,000 per day, or three million every year, by the middle of the next century if current smoking patterns persist, according to the results of two studies of tobacco-related deaths in China in 1998.

"Anti-smoking campaigns in China are still confronted with many difficulties and challenges," acknowledged Hou Peisen, an official with the Ministry of Health (MOH), such as the lack of a good social environment for tobacco control, a close relationship between the national economy and tobacco production and consumption, and the promotion and smuggling of cigarettes produced by multinational tobacco corporations.

The three-day conference, sponsored by MOH, WHO, CAPM, and the Johns Hopkins University of the United States, is focused on topics such as policy development, the taxation of tobacco products, smoking among adolescents, tobacco control in schools, and social losses due to tobacco consumption.



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