The Ministry of Health warned you…

There are almost a billion smokers on Earth

Julia Korowski, XX2 century

There are almost a billion smokers in the world who take a cigarette every day, an international group of scientists has come to this conclusion. Moreover, despite the fact that the percentage of smokers has been reduced, their number has increased in recent years. The researchers note that progress in the fight against tobacco is noticeable, but a global victory is still far away. This is especially well illustrated by the fact that every tenth death is associated with smoking. The results of the study are published in the Lancet journal.

The paradox "the proportion of smokers is decreasing, but the number is growing" is explained by population growth. The more people on Earth, the more smokers, and since the beginning of the 90s, the population has increased from 5.3 to 7.5 billion people. "The growth in the total number of smokers is still outpacing the global decline in the proportion of people who smoke daily. This means that it is necessary, on the one hand, to work on prevention so that people do not acquire this habit, and on the other hand, to encourage them to quit," says the study's lead author Emmanuela Gakidou.

Scientists collected about 2,000 data sources and analyzed the situation in 195 countries and regions for 1990-2015. It turned out that in 2015, 933 million people smoked daily, about 80% of them were men. Researchers have calculated that every fourth man and every twentieth woman takes a cigarette from day to day. Over the past twenty-five years, the proportion of smokers among the "strong half" has decreased from 35 to 25 percent, and among the "weak" – from 8 to 5 percent.

Screenshot of an interactive map from the press release of Nearly 1 billion people still smoke daily - VM

Moreover, more than half of male smokers in 2015 lived in only three countries: China (245 million), India (about 91 million) and Indonesia (about 50 million). But this concerns the number of smokers, and their share is highest in the Pacific state of Kiribati – almost half of the entire male population smokes there every day. Most women smoke in the USA (17 million people), China (14 million) and India (13.5 million). A little more than a quarter of all tobacco lovers live here. The highest proportion of smokers is in Greenland, where 44% cannot get rid of a bad habit. Russians may be upset by the study: although we are not among the top three in smoking, the proportion of women who smoke over the past 25 years in Russia has grown strongly – by 56.2%.

In 2016, 6 million people died from the effects of smoking – a bad habit caused 11% of all deaths. About 75% of those who died were men and slightly more than half of the deaths occurred in four countries – Russia, China, India and the USA. As a rule, tobacco use led to the development of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. The good news is that in 82 states over 25 years, the death rate from smoking has decreased significantly. "Scaling up smoking control, especially after the adoption of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is a great achievement in the field of health. Nevertheless, smoking remains one of the main risk factors for premature death and disability," the study authors conclude.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  06.04.2017