India: Deadly Epidemic Grips “Smokers’ Paradise”

Owing to a growing awareness in the West about the threat posed by tobacco smoking, the cigarette companies made a frontal assault on the vulnerable Third World markets during the past decade. The result: A recent study shows that the ‘smoker’s paradise’ India is in the grip of a smoking epidemic that is likely to cause nearly a million deaths a year by 2010.

Conducted by The Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto, the study predicts that “one in five of all male deaths (and one in 20 of all female deaths) between the ages of 30 and 69 will be caused by smoking. The study, conducted by a team of doctors and scientists from India, Canada and Britain, has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.”

(Last week, a WHO study revealed that nearly two-thirds of the world’s smokers live in 10 countries led by China, which accounts for nearly 30 percent, and India with about 10 percent. They are followed by Indonesia, Russia, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Germany and Turkey.)

According to Muneeza Naqvi of the Associated Press: “The study, one of the most comprehensive ever in India, sent 900 field workers to survey 1.1 million homes across the country. They compared the smoking history of 74,000 adults who died from 2001 to 2003 with 78,000 living adults.

“While an increasing number of countries prohibit smoking in public places, people in India freely puff away in playgrounds, railway stations, sidewalk cafes and even hospitals.”

India has enacted a number of laws banning smoking in various public places, but most are routinely ignored.

The BBC quotes Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard University: “It is truly remarkable that one single factor, namely smoking, which is entirely preventable, accounts for nearly one in 10 of all deaths in India.” More here…