The News Minute| March 31, 2015| 4.19 pm IST
The pictorial warnings on cigarette packets, which were scheduled to cover 85% of the packet area from April 1, will not register any changes as the head of a Parliamentary panel said that there were no Indian studies to substantiate the claim that usage of tobacco could cause cancer.
Dilip Gandhi, head of Parliamentary panel on subordinate legislation examining the provisions of Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, said that the studies had been conducted abroad and that they hadn’t taken the Indian context of smoking ‘beedi’ into consideration.
The panel's findings reportedly has been accepted by the government, which is planning on sticking to the current law which asks for 40% of the packet to have a pictorial warning.
And while Gandhi may not be aware of such indigenous studies linking smoking with cancer, we came up with a few Indian studies that would help put the matter into perspective.
A review of Indian literature for association of smokeless tobacco with malignant and premalignant diseases of head and neck region by Datta S, Chaturvedi P, Mishra A, Pawar P quotes numerous studies from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat and other states that have shown that chewing tobacco is a significant risk factor for cancer.
The review quotes a study by the Tata Memorial Hospital- “One of these studies from TMH found tobacco chewing to be a significant risk factor for oral cancer among males (OR = 2.95, 95% CI: 2.34-3.71). This study also found bidi smoking and alcohol consumption as a significant risk factor for oral cancer among males. “
“Smoking increases the incidence of clinical tuberculosis and is a cause of half of the male tuberculosis deaths in India. Nearly half of cancers among males and one-fourth of cancers among females are tobacco related”. The Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) India, 2009-2010 quotes this from a research published by the Indian Council of Medical research (ICMR) in 2009.
The Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) India, 2009-2010 has been conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai as per the standard protocol under Global Tobacco Surveillance System (GTSS).
The National Medical Journal of India quotes two studies and says: Tobacco-related cancers accounted for 40%–45% of all cancers in men and 15%–20% of all cancers in women in Chennai and Dindigul. The incidence of these cancers in Chennai is showing a rising trend, particularly among men, and the trend in Tamil Nadu may be similar as statistics on the prevalence of tobacco habits reveal little difference between urban and rural areas in Tamil Nadu.24 Lung cancer incidence is increasing in both sexes in Chennai as observed in other registries in India.3,21 Curiously, oral cancer incidence in Chennai is falling among women but rising among men, with no let-up in the number of cases predicted for both sexes. This may be related to the new wave of increased tobacco use in urban areas of India and the high prevalence of the use of smokeless tobacco among younger adult men than women.
A study in 1999 called ‘Passive smoking and lung cancer in Chandigarh’ found that exposure to ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) during childhood was strongly associated with lung cancer (odds ratio (OR) = 3.9; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.9-8.2), the effect mostly arising from exposure to cigarettes smoke.
If you click on any of the links above, they are in turn linked to many such studies done in India or by Indians. Dear Dilip Gandhi: Happy reading