POLAND’S RAPID LUNG CANCER DECLINE IN THE YEARS 1990-2016. THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS THE ERADICATION OF LUNG CANCER IN POLAND

In the late 1980s, Poland was one of the countries with the highest per capita cigarette consumption, smoking prevalence, and lung cancer morbidity and mortality in Europe. After the political and economic transformation of 1989, transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) entered the market. The TTCs expected the cigarette sales in Poland to increase by at least 10% in the 1990s. Unexpectedly, the opposite happened. In the 1990s, the social attitudes towards smoking began to change, spurred by the involvement of civil society, the medical community, religious institutions, as well as national and local administration in developing and conducting a comprehensive tobacco control programme. For the first time since World War II, cigarette consumption in Poland began to decline. As a report by Fagerstrom et al. published in 2001 in a renowned medical journal showed by the end of the 1990s Poland had one of the best anti-smoking climates in Europe. Between 1990 and 2015 tobacco sales in the country fell from 100bn cigarettes to 40bn. This was accompanied by a decrease in lung cancer incidence and mortality. This paper discusses the factors underlying these positive developments.