Giving up smoking is easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times. – Mark Twain (1835 – 1910), the American humorist author, portrays how hard ‘quit smoking’ is.
Tobacco kills prematurely half of its users. For any age group, smokers are likely to die twice the rate as to people who never smoked. You burn alive with your own fire. Researchers – studying over 220,000 adult Americans – found that cigarettes took an average of 10 years off the lives of smokers who never quit. Smoking is responsible for more cases of cancer each year than all other carcinogens (any substance that cause cancer) combined. Worldwide, 6 million people die every year from tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke (one death every six seconds). 22% of the world's population aged 14+ are smokers, 78% do not smoke. Non-smoking is becoming the norm. It is at the top of the list of risks that men and women both should avoid. It is the most dangerous killer, followed by diabetes, high BP, high lipid profile (cholesterol), excess weight and physical inactivity. About 1/3rd of the cancer deaths in men today are tobacco related. …show more content…
Worldwide, people continue to inhale 5.7 trillion cigarettes annually or 15.6 billion daily – a figure that does not even count duty-free or black-markets or local-made cigarettes or cigarette-like products. The World Health Organization (WHO), after first comprehensive analysis of tobacco use and control efforts in 179 countries, notes that tobacco kills more people a year than tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria combined. Nearly 80% of the world's one billion current smokers live in low- income and middle-income countries. Unless governments of those countries do more to slow the epidemic, the annual death toll could rise to more than eight million by 2030 and could kill one billion by the end of the century