An international panel of experts have warned that loss in productivity because of health problems caused by smoking related habits would hamper China’s economic growth.The amount of money spent on health problems due to smoking reportedly far exceed the tobacco industry’s contribution in terms of profits and jobs it generates.The China Daily quoted them as saying that China’s addiction to huge revenues from the State-owned tobacco monopoly is hindering anti-smoking measures, potentially costing millions of lives in the country with the world’s largest number of smokers.http://www.healthuse.com/china-economic-growth-hampering-with-smoking-problems.htmlEveryone knows that China, in addition to being the Next Big Thing, is the most populous nation on Earth. But the Chinese seem to be doing their best for population control by killing themselves off. China is the most smoke-filled nation in the world, the largest consumer and producer of tobacco. Its 350 million guitar chords smokers account for a third of the world’s total. The country produces 42 per cent of all cigarettes on the planet. Sixty percent of all males over 15 smoke. (Only 4 per cent of all women.) About 1.2 million of the 5 million people in the world who die annually of smoking-related diseases are Chinese. The World Health Organization predicts that 100 million young men in China will die prematurely because of smoking.The warnings, issued in a report ‘Tobacco Control and the Future of China’ prepared by a group of prominent public health experts and economists, came amid calls for the government to give stronger support to tobacco-control measures. “As the health impact of smoking, including rising heart disease and lung cancer, gradually emerges, unless there is effective government intervention, it will affect China’s overall economic growth due to lost productivity,” Yang Gonghuan, Deputy Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said.