Jump to full article: Health 24 (za), 2003-11-12
Intro: The number of people dying from smoking-related diseases is increasing and smoking deaths in developing countries now equal the number of deaths in the industrialised world.
Nearly 5 million people died in the year 2000 from smoking-related diseases. One third of them died of heart disease and stroke. Almost a million died of lung cancer and more than a million of other lung diseases. Seventy-five percent of people who died from smoking-related diseases were men. The numbers in developing countries were as high as eighty percent. The number of smokers in the developing world is increasing. . . .
American Lung Association spokesman Paul Billings blames the "cynical marketing practices of the tobacco companies and the highly addictive nature of their product," for the rise in the number of smoking deaths in developing countries.
Study co-researcher Majid Ezzati, PhD, of Boston's Harvard School of Public Health, and colleague Alan Lopez, PhD, of the University of Queensland, Australia, made use of lung cancer death rates among non-smokers to estimate smoking deaths in developing nations. It is estimated that 930 million of the 1,1 billion smokers in the world live in developing nations. Their research findings are published in the September 12 issue of the journal The Lancet.
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