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• An Inconvenient Truth  

On the eve of the national publicity week for tumor prevention and control starting on April 14, Wu Yilong, Deputy Principal of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, revealed an inconvenient truth to the media: children and adolescents are increasingly becoming the victims of smoking induced cancers.

Wu told Guangzhou Daily that his hospital received three young lung cancer patients of around 20 in 2007, all diagnosed with senior stage cancer. Each of them was a non-smoker, but had been subject to an environment of frequent passive smoking. "Studies exhibit that it usually takes 15 years of being exposed to the pollution of smoke to developing cancer," Wu was quoted as saying. He said children were particularly sensitive to the cancer-causing agents in cigarette smoke as their bodies are still growing. . . .

Professor Li Yan of the Tumor Surgery Department of Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University said during an interview in April that tobacco smoke out of smokers' mouth with moisture was like an aerosol, more penetrating than smoke from lit tobacco. As an aerosol it attacks all the respiratory organs, including windpipes, bronchi and lung air sacs. Children's lungs have weaker mucous membrane, which makes them more vulnerable to poisoning from secondhand smoke. . . .

A survey by Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention last year was conducted on 1,302 students, including 731 males and 571 females, with 949 of the students less than 18 years old. The researchers found that 21.1 percent of the respondents had tried smoking, 24 percent among male respondents and 6.3 percent among female respondents, and 6 percent has bought cigarettes in the last month. Among those who had started smoking, 24 percent had tried smoking before the age of seven.

Statistics from the Ministry of Health indicate that Chinese smokers are starting younger. Compared with 1984, the average first cigarette age of Chinese smokers in 2002 had dropped by four to five years, to 18 for males and 20 for females. . . .

The tobacco control report of the Ministry of Health for 2007 said although public knowledge on the harm caused by smoking has been steadily rising in China in recent years--with the knowledge rate rising from 24 percent in 1996 to 35 percent in 2002--much of the public still holds fallacies about smoking.

After the Tianjin Daily published an article titled Smokers Are 10 Times More Likely to Have Lung Cancer Than Non-smokers on March 31, the newspaper received calls from suspicious readers, questioning why some chain-smokers never get lung cancer while some non-smokers die from lung cancer, and why people get cancer immediately after quitting smoking.

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