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China – Chinese tobacco companies are targeting women and children as potential smokers as the market in men has peaked, health experts said on Thursday. Around 53 percent of Chinese men smoked, leading tobacco control activist Judith Mackay said,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but only three percent of Chinese women. “Prevalence in men has peaked, but they are targeting women and children,” she said at the World Cancer Congress in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
“That’s where we need to be extremely vigilant.” As the world’s largest consumer and producer of tobacco with over 300 million smokers,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], health experts warned that tobacco firms in China were becoming more sophisticated in targeting their market. “Girls in China are getting more independent and they have more money to spend,” Mackay said. Calls late on Thursday to China’s National Tobacco Corp, the state-owned monopoly and the world’s largest tobacco producer, were not answered. China’s 1.3 billion population carries an enormous cancer burden.
With one in every three cigarettes in the world smoked in China, the nation had 2.82 million new cancer cases and 1.96 million cancer deaths in 2008. Globally, there were 12.68 million new cancer cases and 7.6 million cancer deaths in 2008. Despite the massive health costs, experts say state-owned Chinese tobacco firms are skirting tobacco laws with tactics such as printing health warnings in English, rather than Chinese, and using very fine print.
“The law mandates that the health warning should cover 30 percent of the face of the packaging in the front and the back,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” said Professor Yang Gonghuan,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], deputy general director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “But in actuality the words are very small. It’s only a fine line.” (They aren’t) hurting anybody but the rest of the businesses. I think, eventually what is going to happen is, (they) will need support for something and the rest of the businesses will say, ‘No, you cut our throats.’ That’s what it is. You’ve got one (business that) doesn’t want to play fair with the rest of the businesses.”
Paulsen said his officers won’t begin doing walk-throughs of establishments looking for smokers, but they will respond to complaints. “I don’t want anyone to be harmed by the law business-wise, but we’re kind of stuck in between,” he said. “We’re going to be complaint-driven and won’t initiate any type of formal action on our own. We’re not going to start walking bars just to find people smoking. I don’t think that’s fair to the establishments who are playing by the rules, versus the single one in town that isn’t.”