Global tobacco death toll still climbing

Paris : The percentage of men and women who use tobacco every day has dropped in most nations since 1990, but the total number of smokers and tobacco-related deaths has increased, a consortium of researchers reported Thursday.

Mortality could rise even further as major tobacco companies aggressively target new markets, especially in the developing world, they warned in a major study, published in the medical journal The Lancet. 

One in four men and one in 20 women smoked daily in 2015, according to the Global Burden of Diseases report, compiled by hundreds of scientists.

That was a significant drop compared to 25 years earlier, when one in three men, and one in 12 women, lit up every day.

But the number of deaths attributed to tobacco -- which topped 6.4 million in 2015 -- went up by 4.7 percent over the same period due to the expanding world population, the report found.

"Sadly, all those deaths were preventable," senior author Emmanuela Gakidou from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington told AFP.

"The deaths of all the people who will die next year and the year after that, and so on, are also preventable." 

More than 930 million people smoked daily in 2015, compared to 870 million in 1990 -- a seven percent jump.  

Smoking causes one in ten deaths worldwide, half of them in just four countries: China, India, the United States and Russia.

Together with Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Japan, Brazil, and Germany, they account for fully two-thirds of global tobacco use.

"Smoking remains the second largest risk factor for early death and disability" after high blood pressure, Gakidou said.