Senators Dick Durbin and Roy Wyden of Democratic Party and Susan Collins of Republican Party pledged on Wednesday their full support to developing countries in countering the efforts of rich tobacco companies to hook their youth to the tobacco habit.

Holding up a peach-coloured baby outfit from Senegal with a Marlboro logo on it, Durbin told reporters the tobacco companies were now trying to hook children to the tobacco habit from the cradle.

"The Marlboro man," he said, "wants Marlboro babies around the world. Jut as in the US, tobacco companies have targeted children and teenagers in other countries with seductive ads that encourage them to take up a practice that will kill many of them."

The senators claimed the Marlboro man hadreplaced the statue of liberty so far as the tobacco companies were concerned. The senators and Bill Novelli, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids, released a paper outlining in stark terms the death and economic costs associated with tobacco use.According to the report, if present trends continue, 250 million children alive today eventually will die prematurely from tobacco use.

If tobacco companies are allowed to continue their onslaught unchallenged, by 2030, 10 million people a year will be dying of tobacco-related causes, with 70 per cent of those deaths occurring in developing countries, it said.The three senators and the American Cancer Society, the American Public Health Association, the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are hosting an international conference from March 17 to 19 to focus attention on the danger to children of the world from smoking.They warned the developing countries that the huge amounts states in the US had won from tobaccocompanies in law suits because of the health costs due to tobacco use were going to come out of the profits from increased sales in these countries.