Tobacco and Public Health - TCSC Indonesia

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THE EPIDEMIC OF TOBACCO USE IN CHINA
cultural, and other environmental factors, such as the social norms on smoking also
related to smoking behavior among adolescents (Sun et al. 1997).
Smoking cessation
Cessation can prevent some deaths related to tobacco use, but there are many barriers
to it. The picture of cessation among Chinese smokers was different from western
countries. Systematic large-scale research on cessation was not very plentiful, but
the 1996 survey drew an outline of the cessation process among Chinese smokers
(Yang et al. 2001).
◆ Only 16.76 per cent current smokers wanted to quit the habit, but without any plan;
◆ The proportion of quitting and relapse were almost equal. 9.5 per cent of ever smokers
were quitting, another 10.6 per cent quit once but were smoking at the survey.
◆ Only 3.5 per cent among ever-smokers have currently quit successfully for at least
2 years.
◆ The numbers of those willing to quit, trying to quit, and successfully quitting
increased with age. There are very obvious differences between groups with different
educational levels and occupations.
◆ The most common reason for quitting was illness, which explained why the rate of
quitting was higher in older people.
◆ Among the students who smoke, 72% said that they wanted to quit, but only 58%
of them had tried to quit. Their reasons for trying to quit were (1) because of the
harmfulness of tobacco use to their health (66%), (2) due to the opposition to
smoke from parents and friends (16%), and (3) to save money (Warren et al. 2000).
In summary, the percentage of former smokers and smokers contemplating quitting
was low in China.
Environmental tobacco smoke exposure
Various methods were used in describing prevalence of environmental tobacco smoke
exposure in China. They range from simple questionnaire reports to measurements of
tobacco combustion products in air of indoor environments and of biomarkers of
tobacco smoke in human fluids and tissues. Studies comparing questionnaire indexes
of ETS exposure to levels of biomarkers have shown that these different indicators
are correlated, although their results are not perfectly concordant. The term passive
smoking was used to describe ETS exposure as measured by the questionnaire.
In China there were large-scale epidemiological surveys on ETS exposure with questionnaires,
such as 1996 national survey, and small-scale epidemiological survey with
biomarkers.
In the 1996 national survey in China, of all current non-smokers, 53.58% reported
exposure to ETS, defined as being in the presence of passive smoke at least 15 minutes
per day on more than one day a week. The prevalence rate of ETS exposure in females