Smoking in India

Smoking kills 900,000 people every year in India, and unless corrective action is taken soon that number will increase to 1 million smoking-related deaths annually by 2010 and beyond, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and conducted by scientists from India, Canada and the UK. For the study, 900 field workers gathered information from a sample of 1.1 million homes in all parts of India.

Highlights of the study include

Smoking may soon account for 20 percent of all male deaths and 5 percent of all female deaths among Indians between the ages of 30 and 69. About 61 percent of men who smoke can expect to die between the ages of 30 and 69, compared with only 41 percent of non-smoking men who are similar in other ways.

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