Big numbers shouldn't blind us to smoking's million tragedies
- Source: Global Times
- [22:13 August 25 2010]
- Comments
By Patrick Mattimore
A well-known quote goes that "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." It is grimly applicable to smoking in China.
At the current stage, cigarettes claim a million lives a year in this country, where over 50 percent of adult males smoke. It is projected that within 15 years, annual smoking-related deaths will rise to over 2 million.
But it's hard to wrap your mind around numbers that big. Consider instead that 1 million deaths breaks down to about 114 deaths an hour or nearly two people in China dying every minute from smoking. And those numbers will be twice as large by 2025.
A projection by Oxford University professor Sir Richard Peto predicts that of all the young Chinese men alive today, one in three will die from tobacco.
There are lots of other big numbers out there, such as the fact that 300 million people in China smoke, and that given current trends, 1 billion people worldwide will die from smoking-related causes this century. Tobacco costs China $5 billion every year in healthcare costs, lower labor productivity, and other losses.
Still, none of the surreal statistics mean nearly as much to me as the single memory of watching my three-pack-a-day, 59-year-old father take his last breaths in a hospital bed 35 years ago as the cancer that had invaded his body finally won.
In fact, the statistics aren't even as powerful as watching a Beijing man who was eating lunch with his young son today light up at the end of the meal, a scene I well remember from my own childhood.
Twenty years ago, I taught a drug and alcohol program in public schools in California.
With the youngest children, we emphasized the harmful effects of cigarettes and many of the children we educated talked to their parents and grandparents, perhaps for the first time, about how fearful those kids were about what their folks were doing.
I know that at least some of those people got the message and at least tried to stop smoking.
One hope for lessening the numbers of smokers in China, therefore, is to put some serious resources into educating children about tobacco's dangers.
Along with Russia and Afghanistan, China has the highest smoking rate in the world.
