Obviously this would not be applicable to a minor, but to
every adult death. It would be very cheap and, as death
notification in one country after another becomes electronic
it will be costing nothing. It would also link smoking in
people's minds with death; another reason why it would be a
good thing to introduce.
At the moment only South Africa has this in its death
notification process. The South African results presented in
the Lancet on 24 August 2013 show that the coloured
population - that is the mixed black and white population -
have more than twice the tobacco-attributable mortality
than the white population, and that it's as bad for males and
females of the coloured population. Now people didn't know
that before. If they include this question about smoking on
their death notification forms, countries would be able to
see how the epidemic is evolving in each part of their
population.
To sum up, in the last century there were about a 100
million deaths from smoking. If current smoking patterns
persist - with 30% of young adults becoming smokers and
most not stopping - in the second half of the century we are
going to finish up with more than 100 million tobacco deaths
per decade. That's something like a billion tobacco deaths
this century if we keep on as we are.
If we do something serious about it, then it should be
possible to avoid a few 100 million of them. They are not all
my definition of "premature death" - they are not all in
middle age - but still, quite a lot of them are. l
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16 CANCER CONTROL 2014