Rise in smoking-related illnesses urges Australia to sue tobacco industry

(Representational image)

New Delhi: With smoking-related illnesses and deaths at a rise in Australia, experts have asked the country's governments to sue tobacco companies on account of damaging people's health.

Public health experts from Macquarie University and Curtin University called on state and federal governments to seek remuneration from tobacco companies for the burden put on the public health system by smoking-related illnesses, said an article published in the Medical Journal of Australia, Xinhua news agency reported.

Led by Macquarie University Health Studies lecturer Ross Mackenzie, the authors said that Australia could use Canada, where the province of British Columbia's right to sue the tobacco industry was upheld by the Supreme Court, as a precedent.

"An estimated 2.6 million adult Australians were smokers in 2014, and smoking remains the country's leading preventable cause of death and disease," they wrote.

"It causes 15, 000 deaths annually and is likely to kill two-thirds of current users. Annual health, social and economic costs of smoking were estimated at more than $31.5 billion in 2008, and are now considered to be substantially greater."

Mackenzie and colleagues said there were lessons to be learnt from the Canadian experience.

(With IANS inputs)