World No Tobacco Day: Tobacco kills 7 million a year, says WHO

World No Tobacco Day: Tobacco kills 7 million a year, says WHO

Tobacco kills almost 7 million people across the world every year and nearly a million of them are not even smokers. It also costs the world about $1.4 trillion annually in healthcare costs related to tobacco-attributable diseases and in lost productivity due to death and illness.

The sobering statistics on deaths are estimates by the WHO while the costs estimates are from a study published last year and authored by Mark Goodchild and Edouard Tursan d’Espaignet of the WHO and Nigar Nargis of the American Cancer Society.

For  World No Tobacco Day 2018, WHO has joined with the World Heart Federation to highlight  the link between tobacco and cardiovascular diseases (CVD) –  the world’s leading causes of death, responsible for 44% of all NCD deaths, or 17.9 million deaths annually.

Of the nearly 7 million who die each year due to tobaccorelated causes, 6 million die from direct tobacco use while another 890,000 are victims of second-hand smoke, according to the WHO estimates. Roughly half of those who lose their lives to tobacco each year succumb to cardio vascular diseases.

Also Read : World famous cigarette company owner quit smoking after 2018 New Year resolution

In fact, tobacco is one of the major causes for heart diseases accounting for about 17% of all deaths due to them. That also means about half of the smokers who die from tobacco use each year do so as a result of heart disease.This is also true of non-smokers who die from exposure to tobacco smoke. Of the economic costs, around $400 billion is in direct medical care costs and nearly $1 trillion is in indirect costs, representing the value of lost productivity due to premature death and morbidity from exposure to second-hand smoke, the study estimated.

The WHO material on tobacco has findings that may come as a surprise to many, particularly to those who use tobacco. For instance, it says that while there is some relationship between how much tobacco you smoke each day and the risk of heart diseases, it is not a linear one.