Christopher Skorus has bad dreams about pavements covered in cigarettes. The Polish street cleaner who patrols the streets of the City of London spends his days clearing up the discarded butts of workers and pub-goers.

“Offices are a problem,” he says, pausing to sweep up a small mountain of used cigarettes outside the front door of a five-storey office block. “I clean the street and half-an-hour later it’s full of cigarettes.”

In his native Poland the police are watching – you get a £10 fine for dropping one on the street. Perhaps the same should happen here, he suggests. “People have no respect, it’s a mentality. In the morning the street is white with cigarettes.”

Workers puffing away nearby argue that since the smoking ban in England was introduced in July 2007, they have little choice but to huddle conspiratorially in doorways. The ban meant the end of office smoking rooms and the death of ash trays in the pub, forcing workers and drinkers on to the pavement to get their tobacco fix.

Now to their horror the government looks to be going further still.

Announcing a review of smoking legislation in England, Health Secretary Andy Burnham said the public ban could be extended to places such as the entrances of buildings to prevent the risk of second-hand smoke.

The effect would be to disperse those huddles of smokers who have become a common sight in recent years.

Britain would not be the first to try to control clouds of smoke near entrances to buildings. The US state of Illinois bans smokers from standing within 15ft of the entrance to a public building while in Moscow the limit is 20ft.

“Define entrance? It’s ridiculous,” says Ollie Barrett, an insurance broker outside his office, grinding a cigarette under the sole of his shoe.

His colleague and fellow smoker Richard Hancock puts it more vehemently.

“Whether it’s outside the office or the pub or restaurant we’re all lepers and persona non grata now. Where I live you have all the undesirables standing outside a Wetherspoons pub, smoking and drinking. It’s not something you want your kids to have to walk past. They’d be better off inside but that’s the smoking ban for you.”

But just a few feet away, another smoker is remarkably receptive – believing the ban could work where his willpower has failed.

“It’s a good idea,” says Tony Dempsey, who runs a building services company. “It’s not pleasant to see people outside entrance smoking. They should have a total ban – it might help me give up!”
Smoking graph

Eric Rams, an employee smoking outside his bank branch on Oxford Street, was initially outraged.

“Next they’ll stop us breathing!” before conceding that it was “disgusting” for non-smokers to have to walk through a haze of smoke to get into a building.

But he feared the practical impact of the crackdown would be be detrimental to staff relations.

“Where will we go to? We’ll have to walk further down the street and there are more doorways. And we only get five minutes for a cigarette so it may not be popular with the bosses upstairs.”

Act of naughtiness

Outside the Bank of England, a gaggle of colleagues stand, like bedraggled sentries, chatting and exhaling plumes of tobacco smoke. But none of them seem much concerned by the impending ban – they will just wander further away.

Although, it does help when you are working in a building as wide as a football pitch.

But if breaking up clusters of doorway smokers has a public health pay off, it could also spell the end of a particular camaraderie that has developed in the wake of the smoking backlash.

Judi James, a behavioural and workplace expert, believes there is more at stake for smokers than just a nicotine top up.

“Smokers’ workplace bonding has always given them a very unfair advantage,” she says.

“There’s something about the act of rebellion, it breaks down the hierarchy between people who wouldn’t normally speak to each other. It’s a shared act of naughtiness and when people have got a fag on, the normal rules of communication don’t apply.”

The default body language of smokers is gossipy and conspiratorial – even if they’re not gossiping she says – and this can create suspicion amongst non-smokers.

So would a mass dispersal bring a swift end to this ad hoc bonding? It could go one of two ways.

Ms James thinks if it leads to smokers taking a walk then this networking opportunity will be lost as humans don’t move in groups, especially across different social groups.

But if it forces smokers to gather in designated areas it could actually ramp up the bonding.

Rebel children

“If they congregate together it will make the relationship more bonded because now they’re going to feel alienated and rejected. It’s the rebel child syndrome.”

The only workplace space with a similar dynamic is the ladies’ toilet, Ms James says.

While smoking bans have made offices a cleaner place to work, they’ve also helped develop the bravado of the hardy smoker standing outside the office in shirtsleeves, she says.

The sight of a huddle of workers blocking a doorway as they suck on a nicotine stick and struggle to keep warm is one that many employers, at least, will be pleased to see the back of.

To Jeremy Baker, professor at the ESCP Europe Business School, it is “a very unsightly and low status start to how an organisation is viewed.

“Companies have spent their money making the entrance hall the nicest place in the building but the whole effect is disfigured by these people standing outside trying to get cancer as quickly as possible – it’s ugly.”

It’s got to the stage where smoking at work is becoming as socially unacceptable as office drunkenness he believes.

“It looks poor – the staff are not focusing on the work they’ve got to do. It’s like arriving and finding people lolling around half drunk. Companies need to look attractive and alert but smoking is stupid and spoils the image you’re trying to project.”
NewsBBC
2 February 2010

KUALA LUMPUR: Contraband cigarettes have become a major problem in Malaysia because of high cigarette prices, low penalties and lax enforcement. The Government is losing approximately RM1.5bil in revenue annually, disclosed industry players.

Furthermore, the illegal market has spawned a major industry which gives syndicates operating smuggling networks up to RM1bil in profits yearly. It also defeats the Government’s move to raise prices to discourage smoking among the young.

A Star Probe shows that illegal cigarettes are quite easily obtained at outlets in Malaysia. Most of those who smoke them appear to come from the lower income bracket as these cigarettes are available for as low as RM2.50 for a pack of 20. Legitimate cigarettes retail for between RM6.40 and RM9.30 for a pack of 20.

The illicit market now accounts for more than one out of three cigarettes sold. Some 38.7% of the industry by volume is now illicit, up from 27.5% in 2008, according to The Illicit Cigarette Study conducted by Taylor Nelson Soffres commissioned by a major cigarette manufacturer.

This means that out of the 23.3 billion cigarettes consumed in 2009, approximately nine billion sticks were illicit. The legal market has also shrunk by 10% compared with 2008 to an estimated 13.8 billion.

In the region, Malaysia is one of the countries with the highest taxes for cigarettes after Singapore. Illicit syndicates are taking advantage of this and making a cool RM1bil a year from the Government’s stance to stamp out smoking.

Industry observers said the huge demand for exceptionally low-priced cigarettes was largely due to high taxes imposed by the Government over the last few years, as well as the minimal punishment for offenders and easy accessibility of illicit cigarettes.

“Excessively high taxation is a major contributor to the rise in the trade of illicit cigarettes in Malaysia,” said JT International Bhd director of corporate affairs and communications Shareen Rahmat.

She added that this was compounded by insufficient deterrence – penalties meted out for the sale and consumption of illicit cigarettes were very minimal in Malaysia.

“As this trade is so profitable, smugglers are willing to risk being caught just to get a share of the pie.

“Present enforcement is just not strict enough to deter the smugglers,” said British American Tobacco Malaysia Bhd (BAT) finance director Steve Rush.

BAT head of business development Azlan Ibrahim added that most of the smuggling was from neighbouring countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and China.

The sophisticated network of the syndicates makes it very easy for smuggling to take place.

“Right now, these illicits enter Malaysia through overland routes via Thailand and Singapore, sea routes from Indonesia, and smuggling through ports,” said Azlan.

Royal Malaysian Customs Department deputy director-general (compliance and enforcement) Datuk Mohamed Khalid Yusuf said that Customs was doing its best to stop the sale of illicit cigarettes.

“We know who they are and where the hotspots are. Apart from having our own intelligence, we also have a network of informers whom we pay for undercover intelligence purposes,” he said.

While Customs continues to raid retailers, the focus is mainly on the ports and coastlines, which are the points of entry for the illicits.

“Nowadays it is more of fraud (disguising cigarettes as other merchandise) than direct smuggling of illicits.

“We have invested in high-tech tools and X-ray equipment to detect the illicits when they come in. Our officers too need more capacity building to match these sophisticated smugglers,” Khalid said, adding that there was no one best strategy that fitted all.

“Yes, I believe more can be done. We have to pool all our resources and be situational and versatile to outsmart the smugglers,” he added.

As of Dec 31, the Customs seized 490 million illegal cigarette sticks valued at RM64.55mil, a decrease compared with 2008 when 495 million sticks worth RM58.2mil were confiscated.

Unpaid duties amounted to RM233.29mil, almost the same as 2008’s RM233.7mil.

Worldwide, illegal cigarettes make up some 5.5% or 303 billion sticks of global consumption.

The illicit cigarettes in Malaysia comprise kretek and white cigarettes.

The three biggest manufacturers in Malaysia are BAT, Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and Philip Morris International (PMI), which together control over 90% of the legal market share.
By TEE LIN SAY and EUGENE MAHALINGAM

It is well known that smokers damage their health by directly inhaling cigarette smoke. Now, research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Environmental Health has shown that they are at additional risk from breathing environmental tobacco smoke, contrary to the prevailing assumption that such risks would be negligible in comparison to those incurred by actually smoking.

Maria Teresa Piccardo worked with a team of researchers from the National cancer Research Institute, Genoa, Italy, to study the exposure of newsagents in the city to harmful cigarette smoke. She said, “Newsagents were chosen because they work alone in small newsstands, meaning that any tobacco smoke in the air they breathe is strictly correlated to the number of cigarettes smoked by that newsagent. We studied the contribution environmental tobacco smoke made to carcinogen exposure in 15 active smokers.”

The researchers found that environmental tobacco smoke may have a significant impact on smokers’ health. For someone who smokes 14 cigarettes a day, their own second hand smoke resulted in exposure the equivalent of smoking an extra 2.6 cigarettes. According to Piccardo, “Both active and passive smoking contributions should always be considered in studies about health of active smokers.”

ALBANY, – One experiment Albany Firefighters conducted tested new fire safe cigarettes now mandated in Georgia. Those cigarettes are designed to go out if you stop smoking them.

Cigarettes cause fires that kill 700 people and injure 3,000 every year in the United States. 74 year old Audrey Baty died in an Albany house fire January 7th, and Investigators determined the fire was caused by a cigarette. That tragedy influenced firefighters to check out how safe these new cigarettes really are.

The fire safe cigarettes are made of the same kind of tobacco and paper, but it has rings in the paper to stop the flame if not puffed. But the fire safe standards require them to burn out 75% of the time.

Firefighters say dumping cigarette ashes and butts in trash cans is one of the most frequent causes of house fires. Firefighters set up a chair and couch in a condemned house, and placed a fire safe cigarette in the trash can with newspapers, and then other trash types.

The cigarette smoldered for a couple of minutes, and then….. “I see smoke. Yea, we got a fire already,” said a firefighter.

Within five minutes the trash can was blazing in the trash can. And 12 minutes after putting the fire safe cigarette in the trash can, the fire had set both the chair and couch next to it ablaze. In two tries, each time the fire safe cigarette started a fire.

“It appears when it gets insulated on more than two sides, it continues to burn. We pulled the paper back and it was smoldering, burning inside the paper both times,” Investigator Sam Harris said.

Firefighters say they concluded from their experiment that the fire safe cigarette is a better system, but not a fail proof system.

“Can’t trust it. Anytime you have an open flame you have a risk of a fire. That’s exactly what we found out,” Harris said.

So Firefighters urge smokers to use extreme caution, and not get overly confident in fire safe cigarettes.

“Continue to be vigilant when they are smoking. To worry about putting them out good. And to not pour the ashes into trash cans, because it can cause a fire.”

Firefighters hope their experiment findings and warnings can prevent more cigarette fire deaths.

Fire safe cigarettes are the law in Georgia now, but stores can still sell the old style cigarettes they had in stock until they are all gone. So some of those are still available. The way you can know if you have a fire safe cigarette, it’s on the package marked “FSC” if they are fire safe.

Georgia was among the last states to require the fire safe cigarettes. The law mandating them went into effect January 1st. Most tobacco companies say they support the move to fire safe cigarettes.

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address will completely ignore a huge and totally unnecessary expense which, if corrected, could fund health care reform without any cuts in Medicare or any additional taxes, with tens of billions left over to reduce the deficit, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

Smoking costs the American economy almost $200 billion a year for totally unnecessary medical care costs under Medicare, Medicaid, veteran’s benefits, Indian benefits, and many other welfare programs, as well as in the costs of premature disability, lost productivity, and other factors. Nonsmokers are now forced to bear most of this cost in the form of higher taxes, and in inflated premiums for medical insurance, says Banzhaf of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).

But, despite Obama’s zeal to slash health care costs, including legislative proposals to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare for the elderly, Obama will reportedly propose no new approaches to curbing America’s number one cause of unnecessary health care costs — one which by any measure exceeds the costs of frivolous medical malpractice law suits, inefficiencies from a lack of digital medical records, outdated policies for treating diseases, etc.

One simple step, proposed by Action on Smoking and Health, would have been to impose, as part of health care reform, a modest surcharge on health insurance premiums for smokers — just as smokers now pay more for life insurance, and, in an increasing number of situations (including in many states), for health insurance.

ASH showed how such a surcharge would slash health care costs by reducing the incidence of diseases caused or exacerbated by smoking; obviously a much more efficient way than simply improving the care for these diseases once they have already occurred. It would in addition substantially reduce the need to cut life-saving Medicare funding, or to tax comprehensive health plans, and is one of the few funding proposals favored by a majority of Americans.

Obama could also help to reduce this totally unnecessary subsidy nonsmokers are now forced to pay by other steps which likewise could be done at no cost and which could be implemented immediately. One would be to direct the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use the power Congress just gave it to substantially reduce the level of nicotine in cigarettes to the point where the product could not easily sustain an addiction and prevent millions from quitting smoking.

Another useful step, says Prof. Banzhaf, would be for Obama to ask the U.S. Senate to ratify the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control — a world antismoking and nonsmokers’ rights treaty which the U.S. supported and signed, but has yet to ratify. A third measure might be to require, as a condition of receiving federal grants, that recipient institutions ban all tobacco use on their property, and provide effective smoking cessation assistance to employees.

“Smoking is the 800 pound gorilla in the health care debate which everyone is afraid of and unwilling to confront. Halving smoking — by making it much more expensive as well as very inconvenient — would pay for all health care reform without any need to cut Medicare or increase any taxes. It would go a long way towards insuring that the nonsmokers would not have to continue to subsidize this activity which many so strongly oppose.”

“A surcharge on smokers would, for the first time, force them to accept some personal responsibility for their choice, rather than requiring others to absorb these huge costs,” says Banzhaf, noting that President Obama, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and many conservative as well as liberal groups have argued that personal responsibility must become a major component of health care reform.”

Those who by their own choices impose huge and totally unnecessary expenses on the American public should bear at least some of those costs, argues ASH. For many of them, including the overwhelming majority who already wish to quit, it would be the first time that continuing to smoke would have real, direct, and immediate consequences — thereby providing the additional incentive many need to be successful, says ASH.

PROFESSOR JOHN F. BANZHAF III
Executive Director and Chief Counsel
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
America’s First Antismoking Organization
2013 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20006, USA
(202) 659-4310 ** http://ash.org

The Florida State basketball teams hit the road for Tobacco Road this week, and a match up with perennial conference powerhouse Duke. With both the men and the women trailing the Blue Devils in the ACC standings, they’ll be hoping for a similar performance as they had on their latest homestand, where they combined to win five of their six games played.

Men’s Coach Leonard Hamilton said, “I think anything is capable of happening when two ACC teams show up, regardless of whether they’re in the top spot or the bottom. You can take the words “ACC upset” out of your vocabulary this season, because every game is what you call a “white knuckler,” one of those ball room balls. Very physical, very aggressive.”

For the women, their run through the Tar Heel State also includes a stop in Chapel Hill, to face 12th ranked North Carolina. Being able to check off both stops on one trip Coach Semrau believes will play to her team’s advantage..

Coach Semrau said, “You know, we get to kind of be Duke and Carolina for a weekend. We can drive 10 minutes to get to a game. You’re not going to have to come home and go back and forth. We always feel like being a team in Florida and we have to travel so far, and for us, to go up there and be able to play them in one weekend, be in one hotel, have our mind on our business, we’re looking forward to it.”

With the conference wide open for both the men and the women, a solid run on the road this week will do a lot for the Noles positioning in the ACC.

Gov. Mark Parkinson called on his fellow Wichita State University alumni Wednesday to support his call for increases to sales and tobacco taxes to preserve the university’s programs through the recession.

Parkinson said he is confident that the recession will end, and when it does, Wichita in particular will be poised for a comeback because of pent-up demand for aircraft.

But he said he’ll need lobbying help in Topeka from WSU alumni to preserve what the university has built over the years.

The state is facing about a $400 million shortfall; Parkinson has proposed a three-year, 1 percentage-point sales tax increase, a 55-cents-a-pack tax increase on cigarettes and quadrupling the tax on other tobacco products.

The state has cut roughly $1 billion from what was about a $6 billion budget and any further cuts will do long-lasting damage to colleges and universities throughout the state, the governor said.

Compounding the problem for Wichita is that the other state universities are the dominant political and economic interests in the relatively small cities where they are based, he said.

“In every other community in this state that has a major university — K-State, KU, Hays, Pittsburgh, Emporia — probably because of the size of those communities, their legislators are committed every session to doing everything they can for that university,” Parkinson said. “They view that as their job.

“Probably because Wichita is a much larger city and has a lot of other interests, we don’t have that same kind of undying loyalty from every member of the Wichita delegation.”

Parkinson lauded the school’s commitment to teaching aerospace engineering and entrepreneurship, which is difficult for other universities to match because of Wichita’s historic roots in those fields. And he encouraged university officials to continue working to expand the university’s fledgling dental education program into a full dental school, something Kansas does not now have.

With general state support flagging, universities like WSU will need to build endowments to eventually take up the slack in their budgets, he said.

Programs like dentistry that lead to high-income careers will be increasingly important because “it’s hard for an endowment association to raise money if you don’t have rich alumni,” Parkinson said.

For now, WSU will have to work hard at the Statehouse to protect its share of revenue, he said.

He acknowledged that the Legislature hasn’t warmed to his tax plan — it didn’t get even a courtesy introduction in the Senate last week — but he said he thinks lawmakers will eventually come around when they see the impact of further cuts.

“I’m encouraging you to contact your legislator and say… we love you coming to our basketball games and our plays and our music events, but what we would really love is if you would help us out on our budget, because we’re going to need some help from Topeka,” he said.

In agreement was Jim Rhatigan, namesake of the Rhatigan Student Center where Parkinson spoke.

Now retired, Rhatigan was a dean and vice president of the university, where he worked from 1965 to 2002.

“People don’t realize when you cut something, it doesn’t show up the next year,” he said. “It’s much later when you see it happen.

“When you lose your top people, who are mobile, and your infrastructure starts to crumble, you’ll know.”

Patricia Rhea said she isn’t looking forward to paying more taxes, especially since she was cut from full- to part-time after nine years at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum.

She said she thinks a tax increase of some kind is necessary, although she’d like to see property or income tax increases considered along with the sales tax Parkinson proposes.

But, she added, “the way he has laid it out for us, it seems to me that (sales tax) may be our only option.”

Women have more trouble quitting cigarettes because – more than men – they tend to take up smoking to relieve emotional problems, according to a leading medic.

The claim comes after a survey of women smokers by the University of Hong Kong’s school of public health.

Since 2006, the school has offered gender- specific counseling under a “Smoking Cessation Service for Female Smokers.”

A survey of 332 women smokers, with an average age of 35, over six months until October 31 last year found that 26.5 percent quit after going through the program. The figure was slightly higher than previous studies, in which 21.9 percent of females said they had quit smoking after non-gender-specific counseling.

Males chalked up a figure of 28.4 percent.

Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee, head of the department of nursing studies at the university’s Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, said the increase in the success rate may not be very significant.

But she added: “We must still emphasize the importance of the gender-specific nature of this program.

“The craving is a big problem for women because, when they are not happy, they tend to smoke.

“If emotional problems such as with relationships or families do not go away, it will be difficult to quit.”

Although the majority did not quit smoking entirely, 56 percent of the women managed to reduce their consumption, while 12 percent returned to their original consumption levels.

Chan said that, even for those who continued smoking, average daily cigarette consumption decreased from 15.2 to 9.4 and they were better able to resist smoking.

The study also found that the tobacco tax increase last year led to a surge in the number of women who enrolled in the program.

Professor Lam Tai-hing, director of the school of public health, said: “The financial secretary should think about increasing the tax again this coming budget, hopefully by another 10 percent at least.”

He added that pictorial warnings on cigarette packs are too mild and should be revamped to create more impact.

The placing of cigarettes in prominent places to attract buyers in shops should also be banned.

The cessation service will start to explore different methods of counseling, Chan said.

The tobacco industry’s profits and taxes levied by the government in 2009 reached 513.11 billion yuan, 55.93 billion yuan more than 2008, or rising 12.2 percent, the State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau spokesman Zhang Xiulian said on Thursday in Beijing.

Of the amount, 416.3 billion yuan belongs to taxes, rising 86.4 billion yuan over a year ago, or 26.2 percent on 2008, Zhang said.

However, although the hike of tobacco taxation by the government has increase its financial coffers, it has little effect in controlling and reducing public tobacco use.

“The adjustment did not result in ‘tax price linkage’ effect. It has little impact on tobacco sales and thus has little effect in tobacco control,” said Hu Angang, professor of the School of Public Policy and Management (SPPM) of Tsinghua University and director of the Center for China Studies of Tsinghua University.

China’s Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Taxation jointly issued the “Notice of adjusting cigarettes allocation price’ in May 2009. The decree ruled that the tax rate of Grade A cigarettes would be raised from 45 percent to 56 percent, and Grade B cigarettes from 30 percent to 36 percent. In addition, it has introduced ad valorem tax at the rate of 5 percent in the wholesale market.

According to the data of national tobacco excise tax revenues from State Administration of Taxation, in the second month after the tobacco tax adjustments, that is, in June, national tobacco excise tax has had a significant increase, with 4.3 billion yuan more than in May, or rising 31.3 percent.

However, marketing results show that the wholesale, retail prices of majority tobacco products had not changed after the tobacco tax rate revision. That is to say, the adjustment reduced the profits of tobacco producers and tobacco dealers, as the new tax burden was undertaken by the tobacco industry itself and thus has no significant effect on wholesale price and retail price.

Therefore, it caused little economic pressure on tobacco users. For their lack of motion in giving up smoking, the increase of tobacco tax cannot reach the goal to reduce the smoking rate.

In fact, to increase the price of tobacco by increasing the tobacco tax can not only increase the Government’s tax revenue, but also is the most effective way to reduce tobacco use and smoke rates. According to researches, if the tobacco prices increase by 10 percent, the consumptions will reduce by 4 percent in high-incoming countries and 8 percent in developing countries. And to increase tobacco prices has been proved to be effective in preventing children from starting to use tobacco products and in encouraging tobacco users to quit smoking.

In April 2009, the U.S. government has increased the federal tobacco tax from 39 cents per pack to 1.01 USD, which is the largest increase in American history. UK has also twice raised its tobacco tax. In addition, Ukraine, Iceland, Thailand, Greece and Indonesia have made the decision to increase tobacco taxes.

The tobacco tax rate is 40% of the retail price in China which is much lower than the middle level, 65%-70%, of the international tobacco tax. Some scholars believe that China’s tobacco tax still have climbing space.

Mao Zhengzhong, a famous professor from Sichuan University, pointed that once China’s tobacco tax has increase to 51% of the retail price, it will have some influence to the price of the cigarette, the number of smoker will decrease and the health condition will be improved. At the same time, the government will get 64.9 billion yuan more tax.

Hu Angang, director of the National Condition Research Center of Tsing-hua University, said that as the increasing of the ad valorem tax will lead consumers to buy lower price level cigarettes, we should follow the specific tax policy when increasing the tobacco tax. We should make sure the actual amount of the tobacco produces rather than the value of them. This will decrease the tax gap and price gap of different cigarettes and solve the lower price cigarette substitution problem.

In fact there are international unified standards for us. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has urged all the countries to increase the price of the cigarette products by tax. The 6th clause of the Convention pointed out that all the tobacco products should adopt the similar tax and this tax should be adjusted periodically according to inflation. The cheaply-priced tobacco products should be equivalent to cigarettes and other high-tax tobacco products to avoid consuming substitution problem.

China is world’s largest tobacco producing country as well as the largest tobacco consuming country. At the same time, China is also a contracting party of the Convention. The Convention was taking into effort in Jan 9, 2006 and will implement in full in Jan 9, 2011 in China.

According to the statistic data, the number of smoker in China is more than 300 million. More than 1 million people die of tobacco related diseases ever year. In addition, smoking will cost about 186 billion yuan per year in China which is about 1.9% of our GDP. Smoking will also directly cost more than 14 billion yuan for medical care which is about 3.1% of expenditures for medical care and public health per year in China. Its indirectly cost is about 172 billion yuan which is a large burden for society.

Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Wednesday.

The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among men and for closer to 10 years among women and children — long enough for experts to say the percentage of very overweight people has leveled off.

But the percentages have topped out at very high numbers. Nearly 34 percent of adults are obese, more than double the percentage 30 years ago. The share of obese children tripled during that time, to 17 percent.

“Right now we’ve halted the progress of the obesity epidemic,” said Dr. William H. Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the disease control centers. “The data are really promising.

“That said, I don’t think we have in place the kind of policy or environmental changes needed to reverse this epidemic just yet.”

Dr. Dietz said the data probably reflected increased awareness of the obesity problem, especially among women, “who buy food, prepare it and see it, and they’re making changes for themselves that they’re also making for their kids.” He also cited a reduction in “less healthful foods” at school.

Some experts, though, were not optimistic that the leveling off was a result of improved eating and exercise habits.

“Until we see rates improving, not just staying the same, we can’t have any confidence that our lifestyle has improved,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Dr. Ludwig said the plateau might just suggest that “we’ve reached a biological limit” to how obese people could get. When people eat more, he said, at first they gain weight; then a growing share of the calories go “into maintaining and moving around that excess tissue,” he continued, so that “a population doesn’t keep getting heavier and heavier indefinitely.”

Furthermore, Dr. Ludwig said, “it could be that most of the people who are genetically susceptible, or susceptible for psychological or behavioral reasons, have already become obese.”

The numbers, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, are based on national surveys that record heights and weights of a representative sample of Americans. People are considered obese if their body mass index — a ratio of height to weight — is 30 or greater. Someone five and a half feet tall is obese at 186 pounds; a six-foot person is obese at 221 pounds.

Even though the data show an overall plateau for obesity rates, they indicate an increase from 1999 to 2008 in the heaviest boys, ages 6 to 19, primarily whites. Experts speculated that heavy children in environments of unhealthy food and physical inactivity might simply be shifting into the top weight categories because their situation had not improved.

African-American adults have the highest obesity rates — 37 percent among men and nearly 50 percent among women. For Hispanic women, the rate is 43 percent. Hispanic and black children have higher rates than non-Hispanic whites.

Federal health officials had set a goal a decade ago that no more than 15 percent of people would be obese in 2010.

“We aren’t near that, and we haven’t moved in that direction,” said Cynthia L. Ogden, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics and an author of the reports.

In addition, 68 percent of adults and nearly one-third of children are considered at least overweight, with a body mass index of 25 or higher. For a 5-foot-8 person, that would be 164 pounds.

Dr. Dietz said he hoped the obesity data would follow what happened with smoking rates, which leveled off before declining. But he said obesity was difficult to address because while “tobacco is a single source, obesity is both physical activity and diet.”

Experts like Steven Gortmaker, a Harvard public health professor, said obesity would decline only with new policies, like penalties and incentives to promote healthier foods and exercise.

“If you look at the reversal of the smoking epidemic,” Dr. Gortmaker said, “substantial change didn’t really happen until there were bans on advertising and limits on consumption through things like taxation. We have to make some substantial changes.”

GUANGZHOU, China—What is being billed as the world’s most energy-efficient skyscraper is being built here in the center of one of China’s smoggiest cities by state-owned China National Tobacco Co.

It is the latest example of a new trend in China’s burgeoning commercial-property market: State-owned businesses in industries as disparate as insurance and tobacco are emerging as developers, putting up the cash to build some of the most eye-catching skyscrapers in the world.

These large corporations are drawn to these projects by potentially lucrative returns and are helped by strong connections and easy access to state bank lending. While these companies typically occupy some of the space they build, they often put much of it on the market to lease to others. China National Tobacco plans to lease out most of the 71 floors in its new project to other tenants.

“We are a tobacco company, but the management is also thinking about the future,” the project’s chief engineer, Hu Baiju, said during an interview.

Ping An Insurance (Group) Co. of China Ltd., one of China’s biggest insurers, already has committed to investing about 25 billion yuan ($3.66 billion) in Chinese property over the next three years through a trust. It is working on what will be one of China’s tallest buildings, in the city of Shenzhen, financing the multibillion-yuan skyscraper entirely with its own capital.

China’s state-owned enterprises also have been shaking up property prices, both at record-breaking government-land auctions and on the secondary office market. Last fall, Agricultural Bank of China paid about US$550 million for a top-grade Shanghai office tower, according to brokers.

“Before 2009, there were relatively few state-owned enterprises involved in land sales and property markets; most concentrated on their own businesses,” said Hing-yin Lee, a Shanghai property broker for Colliers International. Now, he said, “they see that easy profits can be made.”

At the same time, the building techniques Chinese companies are using in these new developments reflect the country’s hope to leapfrog the U.S. by taking the lead in developing new green technologies that have long-term growth potential. The China National Tobacco project has four big wind turbines, solar panels and a dual-layer glass skin that traps sunlight and pipes it into the building’s heating system.

Mark Latham, head of office services for CB Richard Ellis in China, said state-owned enterprises are big employers that are expanding quickly in China, and see constructing and buying landmark buildings as a way to put their “badge” on a high-profile skyline.

“[State-owned enterprises] have the opportunity to acquire sites in prime locations and have the cash or access to cash to be able to develop buildings tailored and customized according to their specific requirements,” Mr. Latham said.

Office vacancy levels are at about 20% in Beijing and 16% in Shanghai. Those are high rates by U.S. and European standards, but the new space is expected to be absorbed quickly thanks to the strong growth of the Chinese economy. Also, much of the vacant space is second rate, so demand for the newly built prime space may be strong.

State-owned enterprises also are keen to show that they are in step with the priorities of national and regional officials, who have made it clear that green companies and those constructing sustainable buildings are going to enjoy more official support.

In the case of the Pearl River Tower, as China National Tobacco’s tower is known, the company’s management decided it would build a landmark environmental building, and four years ago, through a subsidiary company, hired Chicago architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP to fashion the world’s first “zero-energy” skyscraper, generating all the energy it needed to operate itself.

Skidmore Owings embedded the tower with triple-glazed facades and solar panels, and chilled radiant ceilings. Its showpiece: four power-generating vertical-axis wind turbines.

“A lot of clients say they want to build something very energy efficient, but in this case, they really followed through with that goal,” said Ame Engelhart, a Hong Kong-based Skidmore associate. Ms. Engelhart said a building like the Pearl River Tower costs about 10% to 15% more than without the energy-efficient features, but said the projected cost savings could mean the building breaks even within five years. The project is expected to be completed in about a year.

Skidmore maintains that the 2.2-million-square-foot tower will consume about 8.76 billion pounds of carbon dioxide over its life cycle, 58% less than a nonenhanced building of the same scale.

The municipal government of Guangzhou’s construction arm, Guangzhou City Construction & Development Co., also is getting in the act, having hired Wilkinson Eyre Architects of London to design a 103-story skyscraper not far from China National Tobacco’s tower.

The 750 million yuan building, set to open in October as the Guangzhou International Finance Center, features high-efficiency chilled water systems and heat recovery design, an air-conditioning system that recycles condensed water, built-in carbon dioxide sensors and double-glazed windows.
By JONATHAN CHENG

American teens believe that smoking cigarettes is riskier than using illicit drugs or binge drinking, a new government report shows.

That perception may increase the likelihood that they’ll experiment with alcohol or illegal substances, the report authors said.

“We are on the right track with cigarette smoking and need to keep raising awareness among teens about the dangers of other substances,” Pamela S. Hyde, administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), said in a news release from the agency. “Understanding that perception of harm is a strong predictor of potential substance use among young people can help guide the development of substance prevention messages.”

Responses from 44,979 adolescents, aged 12-17, who took part in the 2007 and 2008 SAMHSA National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed that teens’ perception of cigarette-related risk was constant among all groups, but there was considerable age- and gender-related variation in perception of risk associated with other types of substances.

Among the key findings:

* Nearly 70 percent of all respondents believed smoking one or more packs of cigarettes per day posed a major health risk.
* Only 40 percent of participants believed binge drinking (having five or more drinks of alcohol once or twice a week) posed a major risk, and only 34.2 percent thought smoking marijuana once a month posed a major risk. Using cocaine once a month was seen as highly risky by 49.7 percent of the adolescents, while 50.9 percent believed using LSD once or twice a month was highly risky.
* Girls were more likely than boys to associate great risk with smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day, having five or more drinks of alcohol once or twice a week, and smoking marijuana once a month.
* Boys were more likely than girls to perceive great risk from trying heroin once or twice.

More information

The American Academy of Family Physicians offers advice on how parents can prevent substance abuse in children.
SOURCE: U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, news release, Dec. 17, 2009