Study: Lung disease to kill 80M Chinese

BEIJING, Oct. 4 (UPI) -- More than 80 million people in China will die of lung cancer in the next 25 years, U.S. researchers predict.

The Harvard School of Public Health noted the majority of those premature deaths are preventable, the BBC reported Saturday.

The researchers looked at a 30-year period, examining the effects of smoking and the burning of wood or coal at home for cooking and heating.

Researchers said about 83 million Chinese people will die prematurely of lung disease in the 30-year period they examined, which spanned the last five years and the next 25.

The British network reported that respiratory disease is already a leading cause of death in China. Currently, one in three cigarettes lit in the world is smoked in China.

Professor Majid Ezzati, the study's senior author, said the Chinese government could save millions of lives.

"If China manages to control tobacco through taxation, through health education, through advertising bans, and if it manages to get clean fuel to the 70 percent of its population who need cleaner fuels, or ways of burning their current fuels more cleanly, they have a lot of health gains to make."