THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 20, 1994 TAG: 9409200489
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RAY MOSELEY, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
Smoking is the leading cause of premature death in the industrialized world, and half a billion people alive today will be killed by tobacco if current trends continue, scientists warn in a new global survey.
``We are expecting to see a tidal wave of mortality from the developing world,'' said Dr. Alan Lopez of the World Health Organization.
Lopez and professor Richard Peto of Britain's Imperial Cancer Research Fund have unveiled what they say is the most comprehensive report ever compiled on the world's smokers. It describes trends in smoking-related deaths since the 1950s and forecasts deaths into the next century.
The 553-page report, being published today by scientists at Britain's Imperial Cancer Research Fund, WHO and the American Cancer Society, projects that smoking will account for 60 million deaths in the 50-year period between 1950 and 2000.
``And the future is going to be substantially worse than the past,'' Peto said. Smoking kills one person in the world every 10 seconds, but if trends continue, that will rise to one death every three seconds, the report warned.
The report said 50 million of the 60 million victims in the second half of the 20th century will be men, though trends suggest women smokers eventually will die at the same rate as male smokers.
While the epidemic of smoking deaths in the United States has abated, it is expanding dramatically in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the developing world, the researchers said. In Western Europe, the trend also is upward.
``Smoking is killing more people than all other reliably known causes of death in Western Europe put together,'' said Peto, adding that the trend in the developing world and in the former Communist bloc is even more worrisome. Lopez said 1 in 2 men in the developing world is a regular smoker.
``Smoking is like no other hazard,'' Lopez said. ``It will kill 1 in 2 smokers eventually.''
The report said deaths from lung cancer are 20 times more frequent in smokers than in non-smokers, and deaths from heart disease are twice as high among smokers.
KEYWORDS: SMOKING TOBACCO CANCER CIGARETTE by CNB