China must move quickly and firmly to curb ‘rising tide of cancer deaths’ from smoking: health researchers

About half of all Chinese males and 26.6 per cent of all people over 15 smoke, a long way from China’s 2030 smoking target of 20 per cent of the population

Researchers forecast the smoking-related mortality rate will rise, causing losses to China’s working-age population and more cancer deaths in its aged society

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Researchers are concerned tobacco-related deaths in China will rise. Photo: AFP

Published: 6:30am, 2 Nov 2021Updated: 1:12pm, 2 Nov 2021

More stringent tobacco control was crucial for China to “curtail a rising tide of cancer deaths”, researchers said after estimating that deaths from smoking-related cancers in the country would rise by about half over the next two decades.

A slow drop in the smoking rate means the country is likely to miss its 2030 target of cutting smoking prevalence to 20 per cent from the current rate of 26.6 per cent, given that about half of all Chinese males smoke and there has been a slight rise in the number of young female smokers.

“Unless widespread efforts to support smoking cessation are made by families, communities and society as a whole, the huge loss of life in the working-age population over the next 20 years will certainly add to the increasing difficulty in supporting China’s ageing society and will be beyond the magnitude that any single existing intervention can prevent,” they said.

The scientists from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College in Beijing published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Tobacco Control under the British Medical Journal.

China is the world’s biggest cigarette producer and consumer, with 300 million smokers who consume 40 per cent of the world’s tobacco.

More than a quarter of the Chinese population aged over 15 are smokers and more than 1 million people die each year from diseases caused by tobacco use, according to the World Health Organization.

Stopping adolescents from picking up the smoking habit is imperative to China’s public health, say researchers. Photo: EPA

The researchers projected that the smoking-related cancer mortality rate from 2020 to 2040 would rise by 44 per cent in men and 53 per cent in women, or 8.6 million excess deaths over 20 years. And 1.4 million deaths would be prevented if the goal was met in 2030 and the trend continued to 2040, according to the model.