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• The Balkans: land of Europe's inveterate smokers 

The Balkans are home to Europe's most inveterate smokers, where 30 to 40 percent of all adults are gripped by the habit, a major cause of premature death.

"People in that part of Europe smoke the most compared to the continent as a whole," World Health Organization (WHO) director for Europe, Marc Danzon, told AFP on the sidelines of a regional conference on smoking prevention, held last week in Sofia.

Government representatives of eight of the countries in the region - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro - met there to discuss smoking prevention and regulation.

"Relatively little importance has been attributed until now to the battle against tobacco smoking," Danzon said.

The lack of action could be explained by "the power of the tobacco industry lobby, weaknesses of the regulatory, police and judicial systems, the presence of corruption and organized crime and its links to cigarette smuggling," the World Bank said in a recent report.

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