Industry "Must Pay" for Brazil's Tobacco Health Spend

Source from:  tr.itsmyiq.com Mar 25, 2008 03/26/2008

Less than eight per cent of the Brazilian government's health care spend goes on treating tobacco-related illness, according to a Xinhua report quoting the state-run Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. Foundation economist, Marcia Pinto, based her estimates on spending by the Unified Health System on 310 patients who were treated for 32 smoking-related conditions during 2000 at the National Cancer Institute or the National Cardiology Institute. All the patients studied had smoked between 25 and 35 cigarettes daily for at least three decades. They were suffering lung, larynx and esophagus cancers, chronic blood vessel blockages or angina. By extrapolating the data, she estimated that the government spent at least BRL330 million annually on treating tobacco-related illnesses. But according to the foundation, the 'real' spending figure may be 'much higher', because the costs of surgery and other specialized treatments were not counted and because many diseases the World Health Organization defined as linked to smoking were not included in the study. "The tobacco industry must pay for the costs assumed by the state, and anti-smoking campaigns must be intensified," Pinto was quoted as saying. Enditem