A report of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Prevention of Tobacco Induced Diseases (ISPTID)

Tobacco-induced disease is a well recognized burden on human society. It is estimated that in Hong Kong 5750 people die annually from active smoking and an additional 1300 from passive smoking. In China, about 100 million of the 300 million males currently aged 0–30 will eventually die from tobacco-induced diseases. Although great strides have been made in USA to make many states smoke free, smoking-related diseases and deaths are still continuing at an alarming scale. Worldwide, every ten seconds, another person dies as a direct result of tobacco use. Tobacco-induced diseases are the greatest potentially preventable causes of death, resulting in 5 million deaths globally each year.The International Society for the Prevention of Tobacco Induced Disease (ISPTID) was founded in 2000 by Dr. Ed Nelson (University of Essen, Germany) with recognition that combined international efforts of professionals and educators from different areas of basic sciences, medicine and dentistry will provide a balanced approach devoting an equal attention to development of prevention, cessation and medical treatment programs in the area of tobacco-induced diseases.In accord with this mission, the Society's aims are 1) to foster scientific medical studies and/or any ethically and legally permissible efforts that lead to prevention of tobacco abuse, tobacco addiction, and tobacco use- or second hand smoke-induced or exacerbated diseases; 2) to facilitate communication and dissemination of knowledge among independent scientists involved in such studies; 3) to promote and foster public health, pre-school and school health education to enhance human knowledge about the actual hazards of tobacco use; 4) to devise and promote health educational plans and strategies that would help to prevent recruitment of children to nicotine addiction; 5) to achieve wide multidisciplinary dissemination of analyses and new research information on the biomedical aspects of harm induced by tobacco, and the effecti