The government must act now in order to avoid a “tsunami” of tobacco-related deaths in the coming years, according to the co-author of a new report on smoking that appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Wednesday.
Research for the study, Smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption in 187 countries, 1980-2012, was carried out for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. It found that smoking kills 9,000 Cambodian men every year.
Co-author Alan Lopez, a professor at the University of Melbourne, said on Monday that in 2012, 42.1 percent of Cambodian men were smoking on a daily basis, the fourth-highest rate of prevalence in the region, while only 4 percent of Cambodian women smoked—one of the lowest in the region—which he said is “fairly typical of the situation in Southeast Asia.”
The number of male smokers “is by no means the worst, but is sufficiently bad [in the region] and the Cambodian government ought to be taking these numbers seriously. Eventually, tobacco will kill 50 percent of those people.”
He said tobacco use accounts for 7 percent of all premature mortality in Cambodia, and that smoking-related illnesses such as cancer and chronic lung disease will place a significant burden on the health sector.
“That’s why the government should be very worried,” Mr. Lopez said. “They have a tsunami of deaths coming, tobacco-related deaths in males, and this is something they ought to take seriously.”
The first step, he said, is to double or triple the price of cigarettes.
“If you increase the price, you will decrease consumption massively,” he said.
“Another way is to ban all forms of advertising and promotion. Stop promoting tobacco. Start educational programs in schools. Bring in plain packaging.”
Unless more anti-smoking measures are taken, he estimates that about 1.2 million Cambodians will die from smoking over the next 30 to 50 years, half of them when they are still middle-aged.
