--FILE--A Chinese man smokes on a street in Chiping county, Liaocheng city, east China's Shandong province, 10 May 2015. Cigarette smoking will kill about two million Chinese in 2030, double the 2010 toll, said researchers Friday (9 October 2015) who warned of a "growing epidemic of premature death" in the world's most populous nation. On current trends, one in three young Chinese men will be killed by tobacco, the team wrote in The Lancet medical journal. Among women, though, there were fewer smokers and fewer deaths. "About two-thirds of young Chinese men become cigarette smokers, and most start before they are 20. Unless they stop, about half of them will eventually be killed by their habit, " said the article's co-author Zhengming Chen from Oxford University. China consumes over a third of the world's cigarettes, and has a sixth of the global smoking death toll. "The annual number of deaths in China that are caused by tobacco will rise from about one million in 2010 to two million in 2030 and three million in 2050, unless there is widespread cessation, " the researchers wrote. "Widespread smoking cessation offers China one of the most effective, and cost-effective, strategies to avoid disability and premature death over the next few decades."
