Tobacco.org

• Bidis more lethal than cigarettes: Health ministry 

the Union ministry of health and family welfare (MOHFW) manages to hit the bull’s eye. Carrying on with its “No tobacco, No Alcohol” agenda with the avowed objective to free society from the shackles of these age-old addictions, the ministry has now gone one step further by coming out with a monograph that seeks to bring all the ill effects of bidi smoking into sharp focus. An estimated 100 million people ~ mostly the poor and the illiterate ~ smoke bidi in India and 200,000 tuberculosis deaths are due to these hand-rolled cigarettes, a health ministry report says. The monograph has data, culled from various sources for 2000-2004, to prove that bidi smoking is more harmful than cigarette smoking, the health secretary Mr Naresh Dayal notes.

Jump to full article »