Tobacco control

摘要

The world now has an estimated 1.1 billion smokers— that is, about one third of the global population aged 15 years and over. Most of these smokers (800 million) live in developing countries. China alone has 300 million smokers (90% men), about the same number as in all the developed countries combined. About one third of regular smokers in developed countries are women, compared with only about one in eight in the developing world. During 1990-2 smokers consumed some 6.05 x 10~(12) cigarettes per year, with an estimated three million deaths annually, a figure which is expected to rise to 10 million a year by the 2020s or early 2030s. Seventy per cent of these deaths will occur in developing countries. With such huge numbers, advances in tobacco control worthy of the name must have potential to make major inroads into those factors that promote current rates of smoking. Otherwise they risk being marginalised as largely irrelevant to efforts to address seriously what is without doubt a global pandemic. The acid test of this relevancy has always been the litmus paper of reaction in the tobacco industry. If the industry opposes a tobacco control initiative, this is diagnostic of a policy that promises to bite hard into tobacco sales. If it applauds or ignores initiatives, we can feel certain that they are of little consequence. On this basis, several outstanding themes have emerged in recent years.