Tobacco’s Toll
Recent decades have seen a sharp increase in tobacco use worldwide—particularly in the developing world. Tobacco companies produce nearly 1,000 cigarettes each year for each person on Earth in order to feed the habits of some one billion smokers. Tobacco kills more than 5 million people a year—two and a half times as many as AIDS—while secondhand smoke kills roughly 600,000.
These numbers are expected to rise. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by 2030, tobacco will kill 10 million people each year, making it responsible for 10 percent of all deaths. Seventy percent of these deaths will occur in the developing world, accounting for a major shift in smoking trends worldwide—in 1975, 85 percent of tobacco-related deaths occurred in the developed world (and in much smaller numbers).
In the 1970s, a male Chinese smoker consumed on average just four cigarettes a day. It’s more than triple that today. China is currently the world’s top consumer of tobacco, smoking a third of the world’s cigarettes—and they’re taking their toll. Nearly two-thirds of Chinese men smoke. According to the WHO, one in three Chinese men under thirty will ultimately die of smoking related complications.
Cigarettes cost workers as much as 300 yuan a month, while in some provinces minimum wage is only 600 yuan.
This nation of smokers is causing an economic crisis, too. Cigarettes cost workers as much as 300 yuan a month, while in some provinces minimum wage is only 600 yuan. A 1995 study out of Shanghai Medical University found that cigarettes cost smokers 60 percent of their personal income and 17 percent of household income in the Shanghai district of Minhang.
Many blame the tobacco industry’s booming success in the developing world on aggressive marketing campaigns that use tactics no longer legal for cigarette companies in much of the developed world. For its part, the Chinese government has been trying to reduce smoking, pledging to ban all tobacco advertising by 2011. Yet if the WHO predictions are to be believed, tobacco’s popularity will only continue to grow throughout the globe. Although today approximately 80 percent of the world’s smokers are male, it is expected that smoking will spread among women in coming decades as tobacco marketing begins to target that demographic.
In the time it took you to read this article, throughout China 3 million cigarettes were lit up.
-Caroline Soussloff
More on global health: WPJ’s summer issue (Prevent and Cure) is now online and on newsstands.