HL: You're listening to a podcast from the Medical Research Council with Hazel Lambert. By 2010 smoking will cause a million deaths a year in India and these deaths are preventable. An international study found that 61% of men and 62% of women who smoke in India will die prematurely between the ages of thirty and sixty nine. Pulling together these statistics was complicated; it took an international effort by researchers in Canada, the UK and India. Their work was underpinned by a pilot study carried out by scientists from Oxford's Clinical Trial Service Unit and the Medical Research Council. To discuss the findings I'm joined by the Chief Executive Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. Sir Leszek, how is smoking killing in India?
LS: It's killing people in two ways which were really a little unexpected in the findings. Firstly in the rural populations we're seeing and increase in deaths from tuberculosis. Now it's still unclear as to why that is and certainly a lot of work will need to be done to try to understand that better. But secondly it's killing people through heart disease as well as the well established links with cancer and that is an extremely worrying phenomenon for this country. So we've learnt new things by carrying out this study, about the various ways in which smoking can affect populations. But one thing we know above all else is we actually have a treatable mechanism and that is quitting, because we know that it reverses these trends very quickly indeed. So there's a very important public health message in this paper. HL: What can we learn from the research that is applicable to people living here in the UK?
LS: Well the bottom line is there appears to be a slightly different susceptibility as far as I can read the paper, from those from South East Asia and we need to take that into account. Secondly, we know that smoking is extremely dangerous and it's dangerous not just in relation to cancer but into a whole lot of other conditions. And the one area we have to just keep on re-emphasising is that quitting smoking is a hugely important public health intervention.
HL: Now this was an international research collaboration, how does supporting this kind of project fit into the MRC's research strategy overall? LS: Well the MRC has two major responsibilities. Firstly we will support science of excellence in all areas and this study really exemplifies the sort of science that we wish to support. Secondly, over and above our direct remit to support the best science in the UK, we play a major part as a global funder of science, engaging with important projects on an international scale. And thirdly, we all well know how important the Asian community is in Britain and we have to also honour our needs on a UK basis to understand any susceptibilities that this population may have within the boundaries of the United Kingdom. So it fits very firmly.
Now on the international side, the MRC is making a major contribution as a leader in promoting global health studies. What's very important to us is that we also need to get a focus on the chronic diseases and we have published on this in Autumn of last year a commentary that was published in Nature, to identify just how important excess debts caused by chronic diseases, the diseases that you'd normally associate, or you'd think were associated with affluence, how they're impacting adversely already on developing countries. And this just underlines how important smoking is, but also how important obesity is getting, how the dietary changes occurring in developing countries are creating a new burden of disease over and above the burdens already imposed by malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, so a very important role for the MRC in helping the whole international research community discern and tackle these very important issues.
HL: Is that part of the grand challenges in Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases project? Can you tell me about that?
LS: Well the Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases Project is an area where several funders internationally are trying to come together to begin to tackle these big challenges. So over and above the resources that funders make available for the millennium development goals and WHO priority agendas particularly in resource poor settings, we have identified and recognised that chronic diseases will form a major burden of disease and my goodness doesn't this paper really underline how important these chronic diseases are and how utterly preventable they are if we can just get the right behaviour changes in place. And a chronic diseases programme will actually focus on ways in which we can work across cross cultural and international boundaries to get the right messages across in making sure that public health interventions are appropriate in the societies where we really want that intervention to take place.
HL: Thank you very much.
HL: Hazel Lambert LS: Sir Leszek Borysiewicz
