China to ring in New Year with UN-backed anti-tobacco campaign

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) is helping China – home of some 350 million smokers – celebrate the New Year through a campaign seeking to bring an end to the tradition of giving cigarettes as gifts.

One third of the world’s smokers reside in China, according to WHO statistics, while the Chinese Ministry of Health said the number of deaths attributed to lung cancer have soared over 450 per cent in the past three decades.

The campaign by the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, endorsed by the Health Ministry and WHO, endeavours to equate giving cigarettes with bodily harm and endorse better health during this Year of the Ox.

It warns that gifting tobacco means sending “wishes with lung cancer and other respiratory diseases to your friends.”

The new initiative also said that sending cigarettes is the equivalent of wishing “heart diseases, strokes and other respiratory diseases to your colleagues.”

China is both the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco, growing one third of the global crop and manufacturing one third of its cigarettes.

WHO said that there are around one million tobacco-related deaths annually, which is one in four such deaths worldwide.