Gu Jia / Shanghai Daily news

The city still leads the way in terms of the number of  adult male tobacco-users, according to the on-going Shanghai International Forum on a Healthy City.
What's worse is that more young people and females are joining-in, reported today's Eastday.com.
The average smoking-rate among local people is 25.57 percent, made-up mostly of tobacco users in the suburbs. Meanwhile, 50.61 percent of male citizens smoke frequently.
"This rate is lower than the average in our country, but higher than the global one, " commented Li Xinjian, Director of the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
Of local nicotine-addicts, 35.53 percent are aged from 40 to 44, 30-odd percent from 30 to 49 and over 30 percent are female.
Figures from the Center also reveal another problem worthy of public concern.  This is that the smoking histories of 14.08 percent of males and 9.90 percent of females start in their teens, and ome are even younger than that.
Besides the negative influences upon the respiratory and procreative systems, problems in bone-growth and side-effects on the nervous system will come along once a person starts to smoke at an early age.
Nowadays, control measures on smoking and the use of tobacco are being called-for by more and more people seeking to change society's outlook. 
The young will certainly be the key group to be targeted in this battle.