Health professionals need to play a bigger role in lowering the
number of smokers in China, said experts and officials yesterday on
the eve of the 18th World No Tobacco Day, themed "Health
Professionals Against Tobacco."
Doctors should give up smoking, do more work to
inform people about its harmfulness and help them to quit, said Han
Qide, vice chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC)
Standing Committee.
Vice Health Minister Wang Longde said smoking
levels are directly affected by those among health workers, and
overseas experience indicates that decreasing the number of
professionals who smoke would lower overall levels.
From September to November last year, the Chinese
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
conducted a sample survey in Tianjin, Harbin, Lanzhou, Chengdu,
Wuhan and Guangzhou.
Of the 3,650 doctors interviewed, 23 percent smoked
everyday -- 41 percent of males and 1 percent of females.
Over half of male doctors aged 40-45 smoked
everyday, 12 percent in their patients' presence. Only 2.7 percent
of them had stopped smoking.
Though 95 percent of doctors surveyed knew smoking
caused lung cancer, 40 percent had no idea of its link to
tuberculosis, and 49 percent that it is a main cause of erectile
dysfunction. Twenty-four percent were not aware that it is a factor
in coronary heart disease.
Over 97 percent had never offered smokers
pharmacotherapy to help stop, and more than half of them had never
heard of it.
Xu Guihua, deputy head of China Association on
Tobacco Control, said that 1.5 to 2 million smokers buy exported
cigarettes each year and the quantity smuggled into the country has
been soaring. China has become the world's No.1 tobacco producer
and consumer, she added.
According to the Ministry of Health, the number of
smokers in China had reached 350 million by the start of this year.
Jiang Yuan, director of the CDC's Tobacco Control Department, said
nearly 1 million Chinese die of smoking-related diseases every
year.
(Xinhua News Agency, China.org.cn May 31, 2005)