Tobacco deaths to rise tenfold

WASHINGTON – If current trends continue, health officials said Monday that tobacco will kill a billion people this century, 10 times the death toll in the 20th century.

“In all of world history, this is the largest train wreck not waiting to happen,” said John Seffrin, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society.

An estimated 1.25 billion men and women currently smoke cigarettes, and more than half of them will die from the habit, according to the newly revised Tobacco Atlas. It was released Monday with the new Cancer Atlas at an International Union Against Cancer conference. The two atlases are meant as reference guides for doctors, politicians, academics, students and attorneys who work on cancer and tobacco control.

Cutting cigarette consumption in half could save 300 million lives worldwide over the next 50 years, but that would require an extraordinary effort, according to the atlases’ authors and researchers. They fear that a reduction in the global prevalence of smoking would do little to curb what they called the “tobacco epidemic.”

“Even if smoking rates decline worldwide, there will be a constant or even slightly increasing number of smokers due to population increases,” said Michael Eriksen, director of the Institute of Public Health at Georgia State University.

Tobacco currently accounts for one in five cancer deaths, or 1.4 million deaths worldwide each year, according to the atlases. When deaths from tobacco-related cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are included, the yearly death toll is nearly 5 million and is expected to keep going up.

Lung cancer remains the major illness among the 10.9 million new cases of cancer diagnosed each year, according to the Cancer Atlas. It’ll likely remain at its unenviable perch: In China, where 300 million men now smoke, lung cancer could eventually kill a million smokers a year, Seffrin said.