By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox, Health And Science Editor – Tue Aug 25, 6:03 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Tobacco use will kill 6 million people next year from cancer, heart disease, emphysema and a range of other ills, global cancer experts said in a report issued on Tuesday.

The new Tobacco Atlas from the World Lung Foundation and the American Cancer Society estimates that tobacco use costs the global economy $500 billion a year in direct medical expenses, lost productivity and environmental harm.

"Tobacco's total economic costs reduce national wealth in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) by as much as 3.6 percent," the report reads.

"Tobacco accounts for one out of every 10 deaths worldwide and will claim 5.5 million lives this year alone," the report said. If current trends hold, by 2020, the number will grow to an estimated 7 million and top 8 million by 2030.

Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on launched a tobacco center to oversee cigarettes and other related products, after winning the power to do so from Congress in June. On Tuesday it set up a committee of advisers to help guide it.

Over the past four decades, smoking rates have declined in rich countries like the United States, Britain and Japan while rising in much of the developing world, according to the nonprofit research and advocacy organizations.

Some other findings from the report, available at http://www.tobaccoatlas.org/:

* 1 billion men smoke -- 35 percent of men in rich countries and 50 percent of men in developing countries.

* About 250 million women smoke daily -- 22 percent of women in developed countries and 9 percent of women in developing countries.

* Smoking rates among women are either stable or increasing in several southern, central and eastern European countries.

* The risk of dying from lung cancer is more than 23 times higher for men who smoke than for nonsmokers and 13 times higher for women smokers.

* Tobacco kills one-third to one-half of those who smoke. Smokers die an average of 15 years earlier than nonsmokers.

* Nearly 60 percent of Chinese men smoke and China consumes more than 37 percent of the world's cigarettes.

* 50 million Chinese children, mostly boys, will die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases.

* Tobacco use will eventually kill 250 million of today's teenagers and children.

* Nearly one-quarter of young people who smoke tried their first cigarette before the age of 10.

* Occupational exposure to secondhand smoke kills 200,000 workers every year.

"One hundred million people were killed by tobacco in the 20th century. Unless effective measures are implemented to prevent young people from smoking and to help current smokers quit, tobacco will kill 1 billion people in the 21st century," the report predicts.

China by far leads the world in cigarette production followed by the United States, Russia and Japan.

Publicly traded cigarette makers include Altria Group Inc's Philip Morris unit, Reynolds American Inc's R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and Lorillard Inc's Lorillard Tobacco Co.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Alan Elsner)

 

wonderful news to read first thing in the morning.

thank you SS!! :awesome:

 

Why does any sane, semi intelligent person use tobacco?

 

luckily i never smoked a day in my life. Too many people that have taken up the habit though. It is just sad.

 

i figured that with such delightful topics as another Kennedy dying and distheria's multiple threads, this would be a welcome addition to all this happiness and love

 

I know right?

 

I'm not a smoker, but I used to be. Not sure why people always consintrate on the number of dying smokers though. After all prescription drugs is America's 4th biggest killer, yet when do you ever hear about that?

 

I honestly don't care about the dying smokers, I care about the people who die because of other people's smoking.

 

There is no evidence that second-hand smoke has ever killed ONE person, much less the thousands that are claimed by anti-smokers. NO EVIDENCE, period.

 

We fill the love.....

Its sad what tobacco can do 2 you and the people around you....
I hve a neighboor who smoked during her pregnancy and still smokes now that the child is here.. I find it appaling and disrespectful that a person smokes around other people...

 

you keep thinking that

 

find it, post it

 

Alright y'all thank you for not breathing while I smoke.

 

Maybe you should qualify that Inks. Might have been more accurate if you had added the phrase "that I will believe".

There are volumes of evidence that second hand smoke causes disease in non-smokers, you simply chose to ignore them.

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Tobacco/ETS

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626351.100-secondhand-smoking-gun.html

http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2007-mchi/3989.html

http://www.no-smoke.org/getthefacts.php?id=13

 

Most places worldwide have banned smoking in public places, if you die of second hand smoke, not proven, but lets face it, you're inhaling smoke, then you're obviously spending too much time around smokers.

 

The Health Care Costs of Smoking

The New England Journal of Medicine, October 9, 1997

Health care costs for smokers at a given age are as much as 40 percent higher than those for nonsmokers, but in a population in which no one smoked the costs would be 7 percent higher among men and 4 percent higher among women than the costs in the current mixed population of smokers and nonsmokers. If all smokers quit, health care costs would be lower at first, but after 15 years they would become higher than at present. In the long term, complete smoking cessation would produce a net increase in health care costs, but it could still be seen as economically favorable under reasonable assumptions of discount rate and evaluation period.

Conclusions If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/337/15/1052

 

no smoke.org is a valid source for unbiased statistics? :wall:

 

the national cancer institute isnt?

 

lets see YOUR unbiased statistics

 

Here's a couple more things.

If all us smokers and other tobacco users quit using tobacco today tomorrow the rest of you won't be able to afford to pay your tax increases.

There are a couple of statistics you never see quoted in all this.

An active pack a day cigarette smoker has a longer life expectancy and lower lifetime health care costs than an obese person with a sedentary life style.

Also life is 100% fatal. We are all going to die of something.

So before we lament the deaths of cigarette smokers I suggest you go down and visit your local nursing home and see what a long life looks like in the final stages, because I think far too many people place far to great a value on the diaper years of life.