Smoking is really injurious to health!

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has launched this year's campaign for World No Tobacco Day with the slogan: Tobacco and Poverty. The slogan explains the link that exists between tobacco and poverty, and how the use of tobacco, especially by poor people who consume this product the most, can have harmful consequences. WHO notes that the tobacco epidemic is still expanding, especially in developing countries where, currently, 84% of the smokers live. Tobacco use kills 4.9 million people each year, and this toll is expected to double in the next 20 years. At current rates, the total number of tobacco users is expected to rise to 1.7 billion by 2025 from 1.3 billion now. Every 6.5 seconds one person dies and many others fall ill or suffer disease and disability due to tobacco use. Tobacco is the fourth most common risk factor for disease worldwide. Smoking causes a range of diseases never before suspected, including cataracts, acute myeloid leukemia and cervical, kidney, pancreatic and stomach cancers. In fact, smoking affects virtually every organ of the body. It has been known since decades that smoking is bad for health, but the current report shows that it's even worse.

According to the American Cancer Society smoking kills people in different ways in different countries, but what is common is the high toll from smoking, wherever it becomes prevalent. A study last month found that in India, smoking mainly kills through tuberculosis rather than lung cancer, as in the West. According to researchers from the Epidemiological Research Center in Chennai, India, smoking causes half the male tuberculosis deaths in India. Almost 200,000 people a year in India die from tuberculosis because they smoked, and half the smokers killed by TB are still only in their thirties, forties or early fifties when they die. A legislation was introduced, earlier this month, under India's new Anti-Smoking Act, which was passed by the country's parliament last year. The law forbids public smoking and any direct or indirect advertising of tobacco products and the sale of cigarettes to children. Anyone caught breaking the law will be fined 200 rupees. It is important that the government gets much tougher on the tobacco industry. States should raise tobacco taxes and ban all smoking in public places, according to the American Heart Association.