The World Health Organization has estimated that by 2020, it will account for 10 million deaths per year.
An estimated 500 million people alive today, including roughly one-third of all males in China, will eventually die prematurely of tobacco-related illnesses.
However, some epidemiologists believe that if the prevalence of smoking can be halved during the next 25 years, 150–200 million of those lives will be saved. That's a difficult but not impossible task. It has been done before, albeit not on a worldwide scale. After all, U.S. tobacco consumption was cut in half between the 1950s and the 1980s.
“Think about this for just a second. We're standing at the crossroads of the greatest public health crisis of our time. We have an opportunity to do something extraordinary: to win the war on smoking. The choice is ours. The people in this room right now, if we so choose, can win this war,” Dr. David said.
In addition to promoting tobacco control in their clinical practices, he urged U.S. physicians to speak out on key smoking-related public policy issues, including the need for greater government regulation of the tobacco industry and the pressing need for public funding of smoking cessation therapies.
Less than half of the states provide Medicaid coverage for nicotine patch therapy. Medicare has only a demonstration project.