Ontario, on the other hand, plans to phase in its legislation gradually. Although its law is also tough - banning cigarettes even in enclosed smoking rooms or partially roofed patios - the province plans to initially hand out warnings instead of fines to violators.

As well, people in many Ontario municipalities - including Ottawa and Toronto - have long faced bans on smoking in many public spaces.

Quebecers, on the other hand, have rarely been forced to butt out.

Many bar and restaurant owners in Quebec have fiercely opposed the crackdown, predicting the new law would bring financial disaster, lead to job losses, lower video lottery terminal (VLT) revenues and slimmer profits for bars and restaurants.

But the provincial health minister, Philippe Couillard, dismissed concerns that a smoking ban would damage the economy and put bars out of business.

Couillard said the province hopes that banning tobacco use will drop the percentage of Quebecers who smoke to 20 per cent, from 23.

The ban is sound fiscal policy, because any reduction will help the province reduce health-care costs, the health minister said.

He also dismissed the dire warnings that many bars and restaurants would fold because of the new ban.

He recalled the banning of cigarettes from drugstores in Quebec. At the time, retailers warned it meant imminent bankruptcy, Couillard said - but the financial disasters never materialized.

The group also took samples from near the other major nuclear waste site in France - the Manche region on the English Channel - that they said contained radioactivity levels 170 times higher than European legislation allows.

The French Senate is to debate a bill this week that calls for storing the country's most dangerous nuclear waste deep underground in sealed containers. Other countries, including the United States, already bury nuclear waste.

The government has insisted that radiation levels around the storage sites do not exceed norms.

However, the national nuclear waste agency issued a statement on May 24 in which it acknowledged a "defect in the design of storage air pockets'' at the Aube facility in the Champagne region.

Waste at the site is stored in successive concrete containers. While workers were filling in the concrete for the last container in April 2005, one of the inner containers cracked, the statement said.

The nuclear safety agency ordered it rebuilt, but said it caused no environmental damage.

Currently, 85 percent of France's 1.3 billion cubic yards of radioactive waste is stored in the Manche and Aube storage sites. The remaining 15 percent - which includes the most highly radioactive materials - is in temporary facilities around the country.

The most nuclear energy-dependent country in the world, France has 59 reactors churning out nearly 80 percent of its electricity. It also has nuclear weapons and imported waste from nuclear warheads and reactors in the United States and other countries for reprocessing.

"The purpose of World No Tobacco Day is to remove the deceit and unveil the truth behind tobacco products," Shigeru Omi, regional director for the Western Pacific, said in a statement from WHO's regional headquarters in Manila.

"Tobacco products are deadly in any form, whether it be cigarettes, pipes, clove cigarettes, chewing tobacco, betel nut used with tobacco or cigars," he said.

The industry's use of misleading descriptions and manufacturing methods -- like mild, light, low tar, fruit-flavoured, chocolate-flavoured, natural, additive-free and organic -- did not make tobacco products safer, he said.

"All these products and practices are deadly and addictive, and thus the absence of truthful information deprives even well-intended people of the ability to make healthy choices," he said.

He called on regional governments to implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world's tobacco-control treaty, which is binding for most countries in the Western Pacific, including Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.

WHO said smoking was the single biggest preventable cause of death in the world, claiming 4,9-million lives a year.

If present consumption patterns continued, the number of deaths would increase by 2020 to 10-million, 70% of them in developing countries, it said.

"There are an estimated 1,3-billion smokers and half of them are expected to die prematurely of a tobacco-related disease," the WHO statement said.

At the current rate, the number of smokers worldwide would rise to 1,7-billion by 2025, the statement added. - AFP

"These findings raise serious questions about what we're getting for the $2.1 trillion we're spending on health care this year," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard.

"We pay almost twice what Canada does for care, more than $6,000 for every American, yet Canadians are healthier, and live two to three years longer," Himmelstein added in a statement.

"Canadians had better access to most types of medical care (with the single exception of pap smears)," Himmelstein and colleagues wrote in the study, published in the American Journal of Public Health.

"Canadians were 7 percent more likely to have a regular doctor and 19 percent less likely to have an unmet health need. U.S. respondents were almost twice as likely to go without a needed medicine due to cost (9.9 percent of U.S. respondents couldn't afford medicine versus 5.1 percent in Canada)," they added.

UNMET NEEDS

"After taking into account income, age, sex, race and immigrant status, Canadians were 33 percent more likely to have a regular doctor and 27 percent less likely to have an unmet health need."

The researchers analyzed data from a telephone survey of 3,505 Canadian and 5,103 U.S. adults.

They wanted to see if there were any differences in health between Canadians, who have a tax-supported national health care system, and Americans, whose health care largely depends on private insurers, employers or the free market, with older Americans and the very poor cared for by Medicare, Medicaid and other joint federal-state health insurance plans.

The researchers found that U.S. residents had higher rates of diabetes, arthritis, chronic lung disease, high blood pressure and obesity.

"Most of what we hear about the Canadian health care system is negative; in particular, the long waiting times for medical procedures," Dr. Karen Lasser an instructor of medicine at Harvard who worked on the study, said in a statement.

"But we found that waiting times affect few patients, only 3.5 percent of Canadians versus 0.7 percent of people in the U.S. No one ever talks about the fact that low-income and minority patients fare better in Canada," she added.

"Based on our findings, if I had to choose between the two systems for my patients, I would choose the Canadian system hands down."

The researchers said the study population was representative of 206 million U.S. adults and 24 million Canadian adults but noted that only half the Americans contacted took part in the survey, and 60 percent of the Canadians.