World No Tobacco Day: India Is Home To 12% Of The World’s Smokers, 10 Lakh Die Every Year!

It seems as if neither heightened cost of buying cigarettes -?due to the staggering tax hike (a whopping 202% since 2011-12) on cigarettes—nor the grotesque imagery that manufacturers are being subjected to use on the packs, are able to throw people off their smoking habits.

These staggering facts released on World No Tobacco Day hope to create enough awareness to help people nip the habit of smoking in the bud.?

Every minute, smokers get through nearly 11 million cigarettes, 10 of whom end up losing their lives every minute from a habit, that an industry that generates billions of dollars off.?

Reuters

According to WHO, India itself is home to 12 per cent of smokers around the world, which amounts to approximately 12 crore smokers, putting India among the top 4 users of tobacco world over.?

44 per cent of men in India consume some form of tobacco, according to the National Family Health Survey. While around 10 lakh die every year due to smoking.?

What’s worse is that while 24 percent of children in India under the age of 16 have used some form of tobacco, 14 percent continue to do so in the current day.?

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Tobacco kills almost 7 million people across the world every year and nearly a million of them are not even smokers!

It also costs the world about $1.4 trillion annually in healthcare costs related to tobacco-attributable diseases and in lost productivity due to death and illness.?

While 6 million people die from direct tobacco use while another 890,000 are victims of second-hand smoke, according to the WHO estimates.?

AFP

Roughly half of those who lose their lives to tobacco each year succumb to cardiovascular diseases. In fact, tobacco is one of the major causes of heart diseases accounting for about 17% of all deaths due to them.

There are around one billion smokers in the world, about a seventh of the global population, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) and other estimates.

China has the highest number: From its population of 1.3 billion, about 315 million are smokers and they consume more than a third of the world’s cigarettes, the WHO said in a report last year. Indonesia has the highest proportion of smokers at 76% of men aged over 15 years.

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About 80% of the world’s smokers live in low-and-middle-income countries and 226 million of them are considered poor.

We can take respite in the fact that percentage of people using tobacco every day has dropped in 25 years, according to a study published a study published in The Lancet medical journal in April 2017.?

One in four men and one in 20 women smoked daily in 2015, down from one in three men and one in 12 women in 1990, it found. France, for instance, reports a million fewer daily smokers in 2017 over 2016.

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But reductions in smoking rates in some nations “are almost entirely offset by the increasing consumption in many countries with weaker tobacco control regulations,” says The Tobacco Atlas anti-smoking lobby.

These include poorer parts of the world, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Tobacco use has decreased in places such as Australia, Brazil and Britain, where anti-smoking measures include higher taxes, bans and health warnings. Tobacco sales have even declined in China, down by 10% from a peak in 2012, according to the Euromonitor International market research group.

With active or passive smoking killing more than seven million people every year, tobacco consumption blamed for the death of on average one person every six seconds, claims WHO.?

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Cancers, heart attacks, strokes and lung disease are the main diseases associated with tobacco. Over the 20th century, tobacco claimed 100 million lives—more than the 60-80 million deaths during World War II and the 18 million in World War I combined.

At current rates tobacco could account for up to a billion deaths in the 21st century, the WHO says. Smoking uses up almost 6% of world spending on healthcare as well as nearly 2% of global GDP, according to a January 2017 study in the scientific journal Tobacco Control.?

The amount of area used to grow tobacco is staggering 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres), which is roughly the size of Switzerland!

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Cigarette sales are worth more than $680 billion annually, according to Euromonitor. China is the leading producer of tobacco, growing about 40% of the world’s leaves, says The Tobacco Atlas.

Five firms control 80% of the global cigarette market. The top six made a profit of more than $62 billion in 2015, it says. Smokers get through about 5.7 trillion cigarettes annually, says The Tobacco Atlas. This works out to nearly 11 million every minute.?