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China 'evading smoking cuts'
China is trying to evade a global agreement on cutting smoking by avoiding putting graphic images of cancer patients and sick babies on cigarette packets, Chinese anti-smoking groups have claimed.
Health warnings on cigarett packets such as this will be mandatory in the US from 2012 Photo: AFP/GETTY
By Peter Foster in Beijing 6:06PM GMT 16 Nov 2010
Health experts say the photographic warnings, which are already used in Hong Kong and this week became mandatory in the US from 2012, are essential if China is to head off a "death wave" from smoking-related illnesses from in the coming decade. China's State Tobacco Monopoly Administration has been accused of failing to implement a World Health Organisation agreement the Chinese signed in 2005 because of its vested interests in the tobacco industry.
More than 50pc of Chinese men are now smokers, with more than 1m people a year already dying prematurely as a result, however experts said this was only the tip of the iceberg as China began to feel the impact of a sharp rise in smoking in the early 1980s. Dr Sarah England, of the World Health Organisation tobacco-free initiative in China said the "death wave" from smoking in China would grow rapidly and could have serious impacts on China's economy if more urgent efforts were not made to get smokers to quit.
Although China ratified the WHO's Framework Agreement on Tobacco Control it put its implementation in the hands of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, the same body that controls China National Tobacco Corporation, the world largest producer of tobacco products. "I think there is a perception of a certain conflict of interest," Dr England said, adding that China's Ministry of Health had been vigorous in its support for tougher labeling on cigarettes but did not have the political mandate to push its wishes through.
Cigarettes in China are still sold in alluring, glossy-red packets with small, written health warnings. Last year one Chinese local government even ordered all its public sector workers to smoke a local brand of cigarettes to boost the provincial economy. Despite several half-hearted "Patriotic Campaigns" to stop smoking, the Chinese government's own incentive for cutting the habit is in question since tobacco remains the government's biggest tax-earner, generating revenues of GBP50bn a year, or 10 per cent of all tax paid in China.
Dr England warned that China would pay a price for its short-sighted approach to tobacco control, citing studies by the Oxford epidemiologist Richard Peto that estimated that by 2030 one in three of all deaths among Chinese men aged 35-69 would caused by tobacco. "That's one in three of the deaths among china's workers, its political leaders, its entrepreneurs and CEOs, it's graduate engineers and army generals," she said, "China has to ask itself: can it really afford that productivity loss, let alone the medical care bills?"
"If something isn't done, tobacco deaths will have a strategic impact on China's economy. In the past, when the economy was built on labour, the deaths of so many 45-50 year olds perhaps didn't have so much impact, but in a knowledge economy, that is no longer the case." Research has shown that photographic warnings are most effective in health campaigns, with Britain currently experience the most rapid decrease in the world in premature deaths from tobacco, with UK cigarette sales halving over the past 30 years.
According to Professor Peto's study few people smoked in China in the 1970s, but took up the habit in droves in the 1980s, with the number of smokers growing more slowly in the 1990s before picking up again sharply after 1999. According to the Research Centre for Health Development, the Beijing-based NGO, a book of guidelines produced by State Tobacco Monopoly had consistently watered down the spirit of the WHO's Framework Agreement.
Key phrases such as "warning" were altered to mean only "warning words" in order to avoid using pictures, while in many cases other words such as "should" were rendered as "preferably" or "had better" to give the impression that parts of the WHO agreement were optional.
"The progress on tobacco control is very slow, and I see no way for us to fulfil the requirement of the WHO framework on time," said Wu Yiqun, the director of Research Centre for Health Development, urging faster government action. Dr England said there was no ambiguity over the WHO Framework Agreement on tobacco control itself, which plainly states in Article 11, that warnings on cigarette packets should be "large, clear, visible and legible".
Ends -- Peter Foster China Correspondent, The London Daily Telegraph
