2500 People Die Daily in India Due to Tobacco Usage: WHO

Smoking of Tobacco has taken away hundreds of millions of lives in the previous century. And it will still continue to do the same as the consumption and the number of people using tobacco are increasing every year, says WHO, which presented startling report on global tobacco epidemic, 2011.

Eight million deaths every year by 2030
According to the latest report released by World Health Organization (WHO), on ‘Global Tobacco Epidemic’, tobacco use will kill nearly six million people in 2011. Among them nearly 5 million deaths will be of people who are users or tobacco and the people who are addicted to tobacco but have given up. And the remaining deaths will be of non-smokers, who are exposed to second hand smoke, called as passive smoke.

Based on the current statistics, WHO has estimated that tobacco will cause eight million deaths every year by 2030. While focusing on other issues apart from death they found that tobacco use is one of the biggest contributors to the non-communicable diseases epidemic, which includes heart diseases, strokes, cancers and emphysema, which finally results in 63% of the total number of deaths.

2500 people die daily alone in India due to tobacco
Especially in developing countries like India the results are even disheartening. Around 2500 people are dying every day due to tobacco use in India alone. WHO also reported that 33% of adult Indian men and 18.4% of adult Indian women use smokeless tobacco and the number for taking a puff stands at 24.3% in males and 2.9% in females. Even in Indian youth 19% males and 8.3% females use some or the other kind of tobacco.

Graphic warning on tobacco packing found effective
In its 2011 Global Tobacco Epidemic report, WHO said that the large graphic health warnings on cigarette packets are proven effective to inform the consumers about health risks on using tobacco, to motivate them to stop using tobacco and in discouraging non-smokers to take up smoking. In some countries like Uruguay, Canada and some others it reduced the appeal for tobacco, say the experts from WHO.

They found that the tobacco epidemic continues to expand because of the marketing, population growth in countries, increased use of tobacco due to extreme addiction to nicotine.