Whoa. Lots o’ good smoking-related news flying around in the past few days.

The World Lung Foundation announced recently that it expects the smoking-related death rate worldwide to double over the next two decades or so. As it stands now, of the 1.3 billion(!) smokers worldwide, about 5 million of them die every year with smoking as the culprit. Another interesting tidbit to tie into this: There are more smokers in China than there are people in the United States. (See 1.7: Cigarette consumption and Table B: The demographics of tobacco.) About 50% more. According to a rough calculation, almost 450 million of them. They smoke 1800 cigarettes per person every year. That’s almost 5 cigarettes smoked daily in China per person. Not per smoker; per person. One-third of the world’s annual cigarette consumption. These figures don’t even include kids who are exposed to their parent’s (or, if they’re really screwed, parents’) secondhand smoke, which in some countries is upwards of 80% of children.

This makes the WLF’s prediction entirely believable.

What is perhaps more alarming is the rate of smoking among health professionals in various countries. 42% in Turkey; 35% in Spain(!); 32% in Ecuador; 28% in France(!); well over 50% in Bulgaria and Armenia.

What is perhaps even more alarming is that in every single country above, which is not an exhaustive list, these rates are several percentage points, if not dozens, higher than in the general public. In some countries, health professionals are twice or even thrice more likely to smoke than the lay population.

Clearly, this is not helping things. This makes the WLF’s prediction entirely believable, if not utterly undershot.

Things are not much better at home. While “only” about 21% of Americans smoke every day or some days, and “only” around 3% of health professionals smoke regularly, the CDC reports that the progress we were once making now seems to have stagnated:

Most notably, funding for comprehensive state programs for tobacco control and prevention decreased by 20.3% from 2002 to 2006, and tobacco-industry marketing expenditures nearly doubled from 1998 ($6.7 billion) to 2005 ($13.1 billion).”

Pair this with the fact that, when this survey was conducted, 45% of smokers had tried, unsuccessfully of course, to quit smoking within the previous 12 months, and you’ve got yourself a nice little public health problem that’s not going away anytime soon. They are winning, and we are losing.

There is some respite in all of this, though. A new study out of UCSF showed that a nicotine reduction strategy could reduce smoking addiction pretty effectively, with a quarter of the subjects quitting entirely and a huge chunk smoking significantly less after the study. I like it.