Whole & Healthy

You’ll have to stop smoking if you want to attend the next Olympics in China.

This is a very significant stop smoking effort, especially with 350 million residents of China still smoking. One third of all people who smoke reside in China. Still China has decided to stop the smoking at its 2008 Olympic games.

The federal Ministry of Health in China, in the person of Zhang Bin, has stated this week that hospitals in China designated to be used for the Olympic games will ban smoking no later than the end of 2007. This stop smoking campaign will extend as well to public buildings and public transportation and any places that provide services to children. In fact, Chinese officials state that their stop smoking campaign is primarily concerned with the nation’s children.

Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, met with Lee Jong Wook, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2004 and made the commitment then to stop the smoking at the 2008 China Olympics. This isn’t the first stop smoking campaign during the Olympics, however. The idea was born in 1988, and the first nonsmoking Olympic games took place in 1992 in Barcelona. 

This China stop smoking venture has a very uphill battle before the Olympic starts, however, not only because of the massive number of smokers in China but also because the country is the largest producer of tobacco in the world. One million smoking related deaths are reported in China each year.  While this is a tragic issue for China, its stop smoking campaign is also a financial one as well, as society foots the bill for the medical care for these sick smokers.

Yang Gonghuan, deputy director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in China is lobbying for a national moratorium to stop smoking, with an emphasis on publicity and education aimed at teaching teenagers about the evils of smoking. She wants a ban on smoking in public places in China and greater efforts at early treatment and detection of lung cancer. Qiao Youlin, a cancer treatment specialist who is also doing research at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, stated that China does not detect lung cancer as quickly as other countries nor as quickly as it needs to and that most Chinese patients simply don’t get the surgery required to remove the cancer in time to save their lives. Part of the reason for this lag in detection is because the methods of detecting early are costly.

This is an especially prevalent problem in rural areas, where a new rural coop for Medicare provides farmers with approximately 50 yuan (the equivalent of $6.25 US) for early detection methods and equipment, while the cost of these procedures is actually more like 200 yuan ($37.5 US.) China’s lag time in treating and diagnosing lung cancer is so far behind other countries that someone’s ability to survive lung cancer for five years is fewer than 10 percent while other developed countries realizing a five year survival rate of 15 percent.