The Christian Science Monitor has a valuable update on the international fight over curbing emissions tied to millions of premature deaths and tens of billions of dollars in health-care costs each year — the emissions from cigarettes. (Hat tip: SEJ.org news roundup.)

As the world heads toward nine billion people seeking a decent life, it’s vital to examine the continuing promotion (and spread) of smoking in developing countries even as the rich North increasingly succeeds at curtailing the habit. Several hundred million shortened lives are projected by midcentury without big changes, according to international health agencies. Along with the global antitobacco treaty that took effect in 2005, efforts are being mounted by philanthropists like Bill Gates and Michael R. Bloomberg.

The Monitor story describes how developing countries are offering more resistance to the tobacco industry than had been expected by experts, and perhaps even the industry itself:

Times have been hard for the tobacco industry in the developed world, as smoking diminishes in Europe and North America – evidence that education on tobacco’s harms [is] starting to pay off. But as the tobacco industry shifts its attentions farther south to Africa, Latin America and Asia – betting that weaker governments or corrupt officials will smooth the path for their product to be sold – it has met surprising resistance from individual nations and citizens groups who refuse to allow their countries to be dumping grounds for what has been called the world’s largest preventable epidemic.

Last year, I wrote about how John Holdren of Harvard University came up with roughly similar losses in years of life from the afflictions attending affluence and poverty. (Poverty still wins out, over all; his paper, “Science and Technology for Sustainable Wellbeing,” is worth reading top to bottom.)

Smoking-related illness straddles both worlds. Here’s a video about the global antismoking initiative being pursued by Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Gates: