{The percentage of men and women who use tobacco every day has dropped in most nations since 1990, but the total number of smokers and tobacco-related deaths has increased, a consortium of researchers reported Thursday.}<\/p>\n
Mortality could rise even further as major tobacco companies aggressively target new markets, especially in the developing world, they warned in a major study, published in the medical journal The Lancet.<\/p>\n
One in four men and one in 20 women smoked daily in 2015, according to the Global Burden of Diseases report, compiled by hundreds of scientists.<\/p>\n
That was a significant drop compared to 25 years earlier, when one in three men, and one in 12 women, lit up every day.<\/p>\n
But the number of deaths attributed to tobacco — which topped 6.4 million in 2015 — went up by 4.7 percent over the same period due to the expanding world population, the report found.<\/p>\n
“Sadly, all those deaths were preventable,” senior author Emmanuela Gakidou from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington told AFP.<\/p>\n
“The deaths of all the people who will die next year and the year after that, and so on, are also preventable.”<\/p>\n
More than 930 million people smoked daily in 2015, compared to 870 million in 1990 — a seven percent jump.<\/p>\n
Smoking causes one in ten deaths worldwide, half of them in just four countries: China, India, the United States and Russia.<\/p>\n
Together with Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Japan, Brazil, and Germany, they account for fully two-thirds of global tobacco use.<\/p>\n
“Smoking remains the second largest risk factor for early death and disability” after high blood pressure, Gakidou said.<\/p>\n
– ‘Lives for profit’ –<\/p>\n
Some countries have seen sharp reductions in smoking driven by some combination of higher taxes, education campaigns, package warnings and programmes to help people kick the nicotine habit.<\/p>\n
Brazil was among the leaders over the 25-year period examined, with the percentage of daily smokers dropping from 29 to 12 percent among men, and from 19 to eight percent among women.<\/p>\n
But Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines — where 47, 38 and 35 percent of men smoke, respectively — saw no change from 1990 to 2015.<\/p>\n
In Russia — where tobacco control policies were not put into place until 2014 — the percentage of women who smoke climbed by more than four percent over the same period.<\/p>\n
Similar trends are emerging in much of Africa, the authors cautioned.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization (WHO) projects that the number of men and women smoking in sub-Saharan Africa will go up 50 percent by 2025, compared to 2010 levels.<\/p>\n
“Future mortality in low- and middle-income countries is likely to be huge,” John Britton from the University of Nottingham’s UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies wrote in a comment, also in The Lancet.<\/p>\n
Responsibility for the global tobacco epidemic lies mainly with a handful of multinational companies based in rich countries, he said.<\/p>\n
“The modern tobacco industry profits from enslaving children and young people in poor countries into a lifelong addiction, and ultimately taking their lives for profit,” he told AFP.<\/p>\n
The global response — including a 180-nation “tobacco control” treaty inked in 2005 — has focused mostly on users and not the supply, he added.<\/p>\n
The WHO has noted that “tobacco is the only legal drug that kills many of its users when used exactly as intended by the manufacturers.”<\/p>\n
It is estimated that half of daily smokers will die prematurely due to their tobacco habit unless they quit.<\/p>\n
Failure to stop the epidemic means that “scarce resources will be used to treat tobacco-caused problems such as cardiovascular disease, cancers and chronic respiratory disease,” Gakidou said.<\/p>\n
Source:AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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