More than 500,000 women die from smoking worldwide annually, and if present trends continue, this will double by the year 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicted at a global antismoking conference in Beijing yesterday.
There are about 200 million women smokers in the world and the number could increase dramatically in the coming years because of aggressive marketing in the developing world, delegates to the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health heard.
In developed countries about 25 per cent of women smoke, but only 7 per cent of women smoke in the remaining 80 per cent of the world's population, according to a WHO survey released here yesterday. This meant there was a huge potential women's market in the developing world and women smokers could become the "next wave in the tobacco epidemic".
The report said: "As smoking decreases in the west, the tobacco industry, in search of new markets, is making huge investments in targeting women and girls with aggressive and seductive advertising that exploits ideas of independence, emancipation, sex appeal and slimness.
"Such advertising erodes socio-cultural restraints which discouraged smoking among women." The biggest challenge was "to prevent the rise of smoking amongst women and we haven't begun to challenge that yet," Prof Judith Mackay, executive director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control, told a press conference.
However, since its last international conference in Paris three years ago, there was a growing awareness in developing countries that tobacco was an economic deficit, and there had been increased government action to "bring the epidemic down", Prof Mackay said. Two-thirds of all Pacific countries now had laws discouraging tobacco use, she added.
Ireland has one of the highest percentages of women smokers in the world, according to the WHO survey, and with 28 per cent of women smokers (1994), it shares 10th place along with Greece, Iceland and Papua New Guinea. The highest rates are in Denmark (37 per cent); Norway (35.5 per cent); Czech Republic (31 per cent); Fiji (30.6 per cent); Israel and Russia (30 per cent); and Canada, the Netherlands and Poland (29 per cent).
Women are in double jeopardy as they share the health dangers posed to male smokers, and in addition risk premature menopause, impaired fertility, cervical cancer and, when pregnant, foetal damage due to the carbon monoxide and nicotine in cigarettes.
Data from several countries showed that the tobacco epidemic among men was usually followed by a tobacco epidemic among women after a delay of several years, the WHO said. "In an increasing number of less developed countries, smoking is linked with a cosmopolitan and affluent lifestyle, and, with increased spending power and career opportunities, many young women have taken up smoking."
Of the 300 million deaths worldwide blamed on tobacco use each year, more than half a million are women. "In several countries lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer deaths among women. By the early 1990s, the death rate from lung cancer among women in industrialised countries was more than three times higher than the level of the early 1950s."
In submissions to the conference, the Swedish tobacco control programme revealed that in Sweden women smoke more than men and as one of the measures to counteract female smoking, all candidates for the Miss Sweden contest must now be totally smokefree.
A Canadian survey found that 10,500 deaths in Canadian women could be attributed to smoking. Women's Health Australia found a strong relationship between smoking and miscarriages. Three or more miscarriages were reported by 7.4 per cent of current smokers and 5.3 per cent of former smokers.