Academician tarred with industry's brush

This is a country of contradictions. While China has executed a ban on smoking in all indoor public places, a great many restaurants send suffocating smoke signals that the ban is being ignored, and Xie Jianping, a scientist who specializes in research on low-tar cigarettes has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering, an honorary body that advises the government.

The 52-year-old, called the "Killer Academician" by netizens, works as the deputy director of Zhengzhou Tobacco Research Center, which is affiliated with the China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC).

State-owned CNTC is the largest cigarette producer in the world and the dominant company in the Chinese market, which means it is also a main source of revenue for the State. The tobacco sector turned in taxes and profits of 513.11 billion yuan ($75.46 billion) to the national coffers in 2009, a year-on-year increase of 12.2 percent.

Xie said his research focuses on ways "to minimize the health hazards to smokers while satisfying their demand for tobacco products", a claim that Yang Gonghuan, deputy director of Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has dismissed as a pipe dream.

Certainly Xie and his colleagues have failed to present any real evidence that low-tar cigarettes are less harmful than those with a greater tar content, and few published studies in China have examined the validity of the health claims related to low-tar cigarettes.

This is not the case elsewhere, and researchers outside China have reached a conclusion, which Xie seemingly chooses to ignore.

As early as 2001, the US National Cancer Institute found that low-tar brands failed to offer any significant protection against developing lung cancer, emphysema or other ailments associated with smoking.

Its study found that the evidence indicated that there were no benefits to health from the changes in cigarette design and manufacturing over the last 50 years. Popular low-tar and "light" cigarettes are worthless as a way to reduce the health risks to smokers it said.

CNTC initiated a nationwide effort in the mid 1980s to lower the tar level of cigarettes produced in China. In 2004 CNTC set 15 milligrams as the maximum allowed limit for cigarettes sold in China. CNTC's tar reduction campaign has been accompanied by the increasing popularity of low-tar cigarettes among smokers in China.

In 2006 CNTC stated that it put "developing less harmful" (including low-tar cigarettes) as one of the main focuses of its research and development plan for 2006-2020.

Still, machine-measured tar ratings cannot be use to predict how much tar a smoker will actually intake because the way the machine smokes a cigarette is not the way a person smokes a cigarette.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has recently published the China section of a survey on smokers throughout the world. The paper criticizes the country's tobacco industry for misleading the public by advertising its low-tar risk reduction strategy based on innovation.

To appeal to smokers concerned about health hazards, the tobacco industry has been reducing the tar and nicotine content of cigarettes.

The promotional strategies are intended to reassure smokers that filtered and low-tar cigarettes are less harmful and therefore less risky.

Switching to low-tar, low-nicotine cigarettes may make sense for people who are hopelessly addicted, but for everyone else, there is only one sure way to avoid the hazards of smoking, and that is not smoking.

Wei Fusheng, a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, voted in favor of Xie's election as an academician. Wei said that reducing the number of smokers in China will be difficult as the country has a long history of tobacco use, but it would gradually decline, in part because of the low-tar risk reduction strategy.

Well let's wait and see what risks Xie and his colleagues really reduce.

The author is a senior writer with China Daily.

(China Daily 12/20/2011 page9)