The number of smokers around the world hit an all-time high of 1.1 billion, a medical journal’s study found.
Between 1990 and 2019, 150 million people began smoking, a study released Thursday from Lancet found. An uptick in youth smokers has been particularly concerning, authors of the study said.
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Global governments should do more to prevent youth from picking up the habit, said Marissa Reitsma, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
“Ensuring that young people remain smoke-free through their mid-20s will result in radical reductions in smoking rates for the next generation,” Reitsma said, according to the Guardian.
Ten countries make up two-thirds of the world’s smoking population, including the United States, the Philippines, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Bangladesh, Japan, Turkey, and Vietnam. One in three tobacco smokers, or 341 million, live in China.
Over the past three decades, smoking increased for men in 20 countries and for women in 12, the study found.
There should be a better commitment to making tobacco and smoking less attractive to people, especially young people, who could be enticed by different flavors of electronic cigarettes, said Vin Gupta, a co-author for the study.
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“Despite progress in some countries, tobacco industry interference and waning political commitment have resulted in a large and persistent gap between knowledge and action on global tobacco control,” Gupta said.
Researchers looked at the “prevalence of smoking tobacco use and attributable disease burden for 204 countries and territories, by age and sex, from 1990 to 2019 as part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study.”
