A "young women's smoking crisis" is set to engulf Asia unless immediate action is taken to encounter a growing tobacco epidemic there, international public health experts warned today in Kobe, Japan. The number of adolescent and young adult women smoking in Japan has already increased alarmingly in recent years, according to a new survey released today. Other Asian countries could soon experience the same phenomenon if action is not taken now to prevent the epidemic from spreading.

"As the tobacco industry increasingly targets Asian women with messages equating smoking with equality and personal freedom, we will experience a young women's smoking crisis unless we act now to prevent it," said WHO Director-General Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland in her keynote address on the first full day of a World Health Organization (WHO)-organized conference on tobacco and women in Asia.

Already, new data compiled by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare, presented for the first time at this conference, show how a highly developed country in the region has witnessed a ballooning in women's and, more particularly, young women's and girls' smoking rates. While only 8.6% of Japanese women smoked in 1986, that figure has risen to an estimated 13.4% in 1999. Among young women aged 20-29, the rise is remarkable: in 1999, 23.2% of women in this age group admitted to smoking, while that figure was only 10.5% in 1986. The same study found that, despite it being illegal for people under age 20 to smoke, 4.3% of teenage girls now smoke. In the same period, the percentage of men as a whole who smoke has decreased from 59.7% to 52.8%.

"This is of immense concern to us. We have a teenage smoking crisis on our hands and we need to take swift action now to counter-act the growth in smoking before it spirals out of control," said Mr Yuya Niwa, Japanese Minister of Health and Welfare, on the occasion of the Kobe Conference.

"The WHO International Conference on Tobacco and Health, Kobe -- Making a Difference to Tobacco and Health: Avoiding the Tobacco Epidemic in Women and Youth" is bringing together close to 500 of Asia's and the world's top public health experts and anti-tobacco campaigners from 14-18 November at the Portapia Hotel in Kobe. The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare is supporting the conference. Participants will examine the dynamics of the looming Asian tobacco epidemic and consider possible solutions to prevent the problem before it happens and women's smoking rates balloon to those seen for women in European and North American countries.

In China, only 6% of women currently smoke, while, in Vietnam, the figure is just 4%. However, if China's smoking rate for women doubled to near the same rate currently seen in Japan, there would be an additional 40 million smokers in that country alone.

In the 1990s, about 12% of women in WHO's Western Pacific Region as a whole smoked, compared to 47% of men. In Asia, smoking was traditionally considered to not be feminine and to be a sign of promiscuity. But, as conference delegates will hear this week, tobacco companies' targeted and often-ingenious marketing of their products to women via channels such as the media, fashion and entertainment, plus socio-cultural factors such as increased disposable income and the perception of cigarettes as both fashionable and a weight-control aid, could lead to an explosion of smoking rates among women. If history is anything to go by, the implications of these dynamics could be catastrophic: in countries such as Spain and Sweden, more young women aged 15 now smoke than young men of the same age. According to WHO figures, in 1994, 27% of Spanish 15 year-old girls smoked, while only 20% of boys the same age did. In Sweden, 19% of 15 year-old girls smoked, whereas only 15% of boys the same age did. Alarmingly, in at least one survey of Asian women, 40% of respondents already see smoking as a means of controlling body weight.