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Health Official: Doctors Should Cure Their Own Smoking Habit

Published: 2010-07-22    Views:68 reads

 

In China's tobacco culture, even physicians and medical school faculty members have difficulty saying no to cigarettes, according to health officials.

About 60 percent of the male medical staff in hospitals smoke. A stop smoking campaign is now a high priority goal in anti-tobacco efforts to improve public health, according to Li Xinhua, the official in charge of tobacco-control publicity and education with the Ministry of Health.

"Doctors and medical teachers should behave themselves and set a good example for others in tobacco-control," he said on Saturday, at a press briefing in Beijing.

Li announced five research projects in different universities where stop smoking programs are being funded the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The projects are part of Emory Global Health Institute- China Tobacco Control Partnership (GHI-CTP), aiming to enhance smoking control efforts.

Li said some medical staff members continue smoking out of apparent disregard for medical evidence that smoking can cause cancer and emphysema.

"About 60 percent of the medical workers and professors are smokers. Some of them even smoke boldly in hospitals or schools," Li said. "We shall begin to get rid of their smoking habit."

In May 2009, the ministry banned smoking in medical institutions and ordered that all health administrations and at least half of all health insti-tutions should be smoke-free by this year. By the end of next year, all targeted institutions should be smoke-free.

Nevertheless, tobacco use remains pervasive in China, the official said.

The nation has the world's highest population of smokers, and ranks first in tobacco output and sales, according to Li.

According to the ministry's first report on smoking and health in China, issued in 2006, more than 1 million people die annually from diseases caused by smoking, meaning one tobacco-related death every 30 seconds. The annual death toll will increase to 2 million in 2020, and 3 million in 2050, the report speculated.

In 2005, the nation produced 1.8 trillion cigarettes. By the end of 2008, the number exceeded 2.2 trillion and production may be higher in 2009, according to Li.

Some anti-tobacco advocates have initiated programs to persuade farmers to give up tobacco planting.

"My college decided to target our research on several selected villages, convincing them that the tobacco industry can be replaced by other industries that are more healthy, sustainable and profitable," said Zhao Yaqiao, dean of the College of Economics and Management, Yunnan Agricultural University in Yunnan Province.

Zhao will lead a program in Yunnan to shift the focus of agriculture from tobacco plantations to ecological tourism and the growing of herbal plants.

"It is certain that tobacco companies and the local governments will disagree," Zhao told the Global Times. "The program will involve them and convince them."

Cultivating social attitudes against smoking also plays a major role in tobacco-control, suggested Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, in charge of the GHI-CTP, citing that the current decline in tobacco use in the US owes a lot to the huge change in the way people think about smoking.