Home > Programs > Research Grants > International Tobacco and Health Research and Capacity Building Program > Report

TOBAC Report

Success Story

Dr. Samet, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Tobacco control, was responsible for some of the first surveillance efforts tracking China's tobacco epidemic in the mid-1990s. With support from Fogarty, he and his colleagues from Hopkins collaborated with the Chinese Academy of Medicine to design an intervention program that would reduce environmental tobacco smoke exposure at home. "Fogarty was the first significant body to fund smoking research and surveillance efforts, and at a time when traditional funders were shying away from the tobacco issue," said Dr. Samet. According to him, this early recognition of the importance of the issue led to successive funding from other organizations and eventually the creation of larger programs focused on reducing tobacco use.

Dr. Samet's initial Fogarty-supported work in China centered around interventions and capacity building, and quickly produced results. "The 1996 smoking survey funded by Fogarty was one of the first that was truly representative of the Chinese population," said Dr. Samet. The Fogarty grants were also effective in that they built upon relationships he had formed over decades with highly capable Chinese researchers essential to operating effectively in country. In fact, Dr. Samet's primary Chinese collaborator Dr. Gong-Huan Yang is now Deputy Director of China's CDC.

In another Fogarty-supported study, Dr. Hu and his colleagues from University of California, Berkeley and other UC campuses approached China's tobacco problem from a health economics perspective. By examining the economic costs of smoking, the impact of a tobacco tax and the cost effectiveness of tobacco control interventions, Dr. Hu was able to influence national policy in China.

In the study, Dr. Hu and his colleagues demonstrated that a 10 percent increase in cigarette taxes would increase revenue by $3.6 billion while reducing smoking by 1.5 percent. These findings enabled the Chinese health officials to convince the People's Congress that policy changes regarding tobacco use were necessary. In 2005, China became a signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, widely considered to be the first global health treaty. According to Dr. Hu, this is a huge step, given that China is the world's largest tobacco producer and accounts for roughly a fourth of global production. "Considering the Chinese government owns the means of tobacco production, the signing of the Framework Convention is a major success," he said.