(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-04-01 10:19

BEIJING  -- More needs to be done to correct the long-standing myth among the Chinese public that low-tar cigarettes are less dangerous than normal ones, health experts have warned.

The anti-smoking measures are urgent with Beijing promising a tobacco-free Olympics and banning smoking in most public places starting May 1, tobacco-control advocates were quoted Tuesday by English-language China Daily as saying at a seminar in the capital.

They cited a recent survey that found close to 60 percent of respondents believed smokers take in less tar -- a carcinogen -- from low-tar cigarettes, while 56.83 percent of those polled said that smoking such cigarettes will be safer than puffing on other types.

The survey, by the Beijing-based Think Tank Research Center for Health Development and news portal Sohu.com, polled 1,403 people last month. A majority of those polled were aged 29-50, with 86 percent being smokers.

"The so-called low-tar cigarettes are as harmful as other tobacco products. The trick is in the cigarette design," said Wu Yiqun, the survey designer and director of the research center.

Low-tar cigarettes are defined according to tar levels in cigarette smoke measured by machines, experts said.

Investigations in the United States, where the first "light" cigarette was born, found in 2001 that in order to get lower tar levels, tobacco producers changed the design of cigarettes, such as adding ventilation holes invisible to the naked eye, to dilute the tar in smoke from such cigarettes.

But these measurements do not reflect how much smokers are exposed to the fatal substances emitted by cigarettes, one reason being that smokers just inhale deeper, said Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Chief Representative in China, in a statement in January.

Medical evidence in the past five decades also show that the incidence of lung cancer has not drop from the prevalence of low-tar cigarettes, Zhi Xiuyi, professor and director of Beijing Lung Cancer Center, was quoted as saying.

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