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)