Smoking ‘kills five million a year’
A new study published today has found that worldwide almost five million people a year die from smoking related diseases.
The study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, found that for the first time in 2000 as many people died in developing countries as in developed ones.
The statistics are based on work by the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Researchers found that an estimated 930 million of the world’s 1.1 billion smokers live in the developing world where 84% of those who die from smoking related illnesses are men. This compares to 75%in the developed world.
The survey looked at data from 125 countries and found that heart disease was the main course of death, killing almost1.7 million people a year, with lung disease and lung cancer coming close second and third.
The researchers predicted that these numbers will keep on increasing and called for more education and prevention work to be done.
