Big Tobacco Looking for Profits and Death in Burma

With most of worlds nations having placed restrictions on the sale and use of tobacco mainly in the form of cigarettes the major tobacco companies are always searching for new markets.  One has emerged Burma.  After decades of military rule Burmas new civilian led government is seeking corporations who are willing to invest in the country with the aim of turning its morriy bound economy around.

Enter big tobacco.  Needing new markets in countries with loose regulations on their product Burma is a perfect storm of opportunity for not only inflicting   a whole customer based with a wide range of health problems but those ever needed profits to keep those greedy shareholders happy.

   Tobacco is already a problem in this impoverished Southeast Asian country where anti-tobacco legislation is weak. But as Myanmar opens its doors to the world after half a century of military rule, it faces a new threat: Large multinational cigarette companies looking for new markets.After years of isolation, many young people want to be as "cool" as their Western peers. "I wanted to imitate the people I saw in movies," said Kyaw Zin Lin, 42, who began smoking at age 12. He got his first packet of cigarettes from his parents' grocery shop. "It seemed cool then."

Opportunity knocksOnly 9.2 percent of smokers use Western-style filtered cigarettes, according to Myanmar's ministry of health, and that is the reason foreign manufacturers see an opportunity to boost sales that are plateauing or falling in more developed markets.
The cancer ward at Yangon's main hospital is usually crowded, and the World Health Organisation estimates one in five deaths in Myanmar is attributed to smoking.
Cigarette sales are expected to grow at between 2-3 percent a year for the next four years, according to Shane MacGuill, a tobacco industry analyst at research firm Euromonitor.

"Transnational tobacco companies in Myanmar bring with them a complete denial of the health evidence along with sophisticated marketing and sponsorship," the World Lung Foundation's Mackay said. "They're wolves in sheep's clothing."
Myanmar is already awash with imported foreign cigarette brands such as Camel and Benson & Hedges. But these sell for about three times more than locally made cigarettes.
"If you open a factory in Myanmar, you can sell at a cheap price," making foreign brands more accessible to cost-and image-conscious consumers, said YarZar Nyunt of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.
"Corruption is a problem and the government is not that concerned with people's health. They first opened Myanmar to alcohol companies, and now tobacco firms," he adds.

Tobacco companies kept secret research concerning the health risks posed by their products.

New research suggests that tobacco companies have known for 40 years that cigarette smoke contains cancer-causing particles, but deliberately hid the information from the public.

PICTURES: 47 vintage smoking ads: When doctors plugged tobacco

For the study - published in the September 27 issue of Nicotine & Tobacco Research - UCLA researchers examined dozens of internal tobacco industry documents made public after a 1998 court case, and found tobacco companies had known cigarette smoke contained potentially dangerous radioactive particles as early as 1959.

"They knew that the cigarette smoke was radioactive way back then and that it could potentially result in cancer, and they deliberately kept that information under wraps," study author Dr. Hrayr S. Karagueuzian, professor of cardiology at UCLA's cardiovascular research laboratory, said in a written statement. "We show here that the industry used misleading statements to obfuscate the hazard of ionizing alpha particles to the lungs of smokers and, more importantly, banned any and all publication on tobacco smoke radioactivity."

Tobacco CEO's testify before the U.S. Congress and lied

Tobacco Chiefs Say Cigarettes Aren't Addictive

The executives, sitting side by side at a conference table in what seemed to many a counterpoint to the growing antismoking sentiment in Congress, faced more than six hours of sharp questioning by members of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment.
Under persistent questioning, each of the executives agreed to give Congress extensive, previously unpublicized research on humans and animals that their companies had done concerning nicotine and addiction.
Democratic Congressmen on the panel, inspired by recent news reports, pressed the executives on whether their companies manipulated the content of nicotine to keep smokers addicted to cigarettes. The executives acknowledged that nicotine levels could be and were controlled by altering the blends of tobacco, but they said this was done to enhance flavor, not to insure addiction.